The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  They looked at him. Miller shook his head.

  “You could walk it in fifteen minutes,” he said. “It would be easy to walk it in fifteen minutes.”

  “I didn’t go straight to the apartment,” John said. “I walked a way up the avenue—and over and down Madison. I didn’t hurry.”

  They waited briefly. Then Miller said, “Why did you do that, Mr. Hayward?”

  “I felt like walking,” John said.

  But that had not really been all of it. He had walked slowly, in the spring air. He had felt like walking. He had felt fine. He had stopped to look in the windows of Black Starr & Gorham and had crossed the avenue to look in a window at Cartier’s. He had walked as far uptown as Fifty-seventh Street and at the corner had looked in Tiffany’s windows. He had almost gone into Tiffany’s, but in the end had not.

  He had been thinking about a ring, and had decided against buying a ring. In the end he wondered how he had ever thought of buying a ring that afternoon, and having it in a pocket to pull out proudly if he was given cause for pride. When he pictured the scene, he realized how entirely presumptuous he had thought of allowing himself to be. (Like a salesman, with an order book; with an injunction to sign here.) It would be the crassest possible way of taking Barbara for granted—of revealing that he took her for granted.

  So in the end he had walked through Fifty-seventh and then down Madison, and he had not looked in any more jeweler’s windows. But he had taken his time—walked bareheaded in the soft sunshine and thought of the future, which had looked then very good indeed. He had made plans, as one should who contemplates marriage; and that even when the world seems rickety. (But it was only in the largest sense, almost in an academic sense, that the world did seem rickety. It would somehow be shored up; order would, in some fashion, finally assert itself.)

  They did not say anything.

  “That’s all,” John Hayward said. “It was a pleasant afternoon. I felt like walking.”

  “Evidently,” Garfield said. “You got in about ten of four.”

  “I suppose, then,” John said, and his voice rasped, but was entirely steady, “that it was some time about then the girl was killed? During that hour?” He pinned it down. “Between a little before three and sometime around four?”

  Miller and Garfield looked at each other. They looked at Martinelli, from the district attorney’s office.

  “About then,” Martinelli said. “May as well tell him, lieutenant. He doesn’t seem to get the idea, somehow.”

  At a quarter of three, or thereabouts, Nora Evans had been alive. She had been alive, and carrying yellow daffodils wrapped in a cone of paper, and had been waiting in the lobby of the apartment house in East Eleventh Street for the automatic elevator to come down. The elevator had come down carrying another tenant, who knew Miss Evans by sight—and just to speak to—and had said, “Good afternoon. Such a pretty afternoon,” and then, as an afterthought, “Such pretty flowers.” Nora Evans had smiled. (“Such a sweet girl, I’d always thought,” Mrs. Maude Apfel, who was the outbound tenant, said. “Of course, I hadn’t had any idea she was—that kind.”) Miss Evans had said, “Yes, aren’t they?” and got into the elevator. So she was alive then.

  She was dead, on the floor of her living room, at about four-ten. She had been wearing only a thin robe, and as she fell (“or in the struggle. Was that it, Mr. Hayward?”) the robe had fallen open, so that she lay naked on the floor, except for her sleeve-covered arms. She had been found so by a part-time maid, colored, named Bertha Johnson. Bertha Johnson had notified the police.

  “Part-time cleaning woman,” Garfield said. “Worked for several people in the neighborhood. Four to six for Miss Evans, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. But you knew about that, Mr. Hayward.”

  “No,” John said. “I don’t know about that.”

  He was told, but without conviction, to have it his own way.

  Nora Evans had been strangled. The pressure needed in manual strangulation varies greatly. Some die very quickly, when hands are on their throats. Nora Evans had.

  But there had been marks. Nails had dug into soft skin. From measurements, the murderer had been a man. He had had long-fingered, strong hands.

  Garfield looked at John’s hands, and Miller looked at them. John kept his long-fingered hands quite steady.

  The murderer’s nails had been of medium length, probably extending just beyond the flesh of the finger tips. John held his own hands out, then, still keeping them steady. The nails were cut shorter than that.

  “Sure,” Garfield said. “We see them, Mr. Hayward. Gave yourself a manicure when you got home, didn’t you? Before you went on this other date?”

  John merely shook his head.

  “She’d been taking a bath,” Garfield said. “The Evans girl had. Bathroom was still steamy when the cleaning woman got there. Bath towel wet. Looks like she hadn’t expected you right then, Mr. Hayward. Maybe didn’t expect you at all. Was that it?”

  John said nothing.

  “If that’s the way he wants it, he’s got a right,” Miller said.

  The assistant medical examiner had not reached the apartment until a little after five. By that time, it could be determined only that the girl had been dead between an hour and two hours, probably nearer two hours.

  “You see how it is,” Garfield said. “You got a cab—”

  “No,” John said.

  “He’s got a right,” Miller said.

  “O.K.,” Garfield said. “You could have got a cab. You like it better that way? You could have got a cab at the Harvard Club say about—oh, make it three o’clock. You could have got down to Eleventh Street in maybe ten minutes. Saturday afternoon. Not as much traffic as usual. Kill the girl in ten minutes—make it fifteen. Get a cab to your place. Get there about a quarter of four. Like you say. Like the elevator man says.”

  John shook his head.

  “You mean there’s something wrong with it?” Miller said. “Mean the lieutenant here’s got the times wrong?”

  “I mean I did what I said. Walked a while.”

  “But the times are all right? You admit that, don’t you?”

  “It could have been done that way,” John said. His voice, to his own ears, sounded strangely without life. “Maybe it was. Not by me.”

  Miller sighed. He looked at Garfield, at Martinelli. Martinelli shrugged; Garfield shook his head.

  “The way you say it,” Miller said. “You were framed. That’s the line you’re taking.” John did not answer. “All right,” Miller said. “This man who framed you. How’d he know you wouldn’t be some place with a lot of people? Have an alibi we couldn’t break down?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “He must have known.”

  They kept for a long time to that point. Over and over they asked him, always patiently, always skeptically, what amounted to the same question. He said he had been conspired against—been “framed.” Then whoever had framed him must have known that, for the period during which the girl was killed, he had no proof that he could not have been the killer. Then, how did this man who was framing him know that?

  They varied the form of the question. They offered him suggestions. Had he told anyone at the club that he was going to walk to his apartment, and not walk there directly? Had someone followed him for a time, until the aimlessness of his direction became evident? John did not know. He said he did not know. He could not remember he had told anyone of his plans. It had not really been a plan. It had been—

  Miller asked the questions. Then Martinelli asked them. Then Garfield asked them. Once or twice, but only once or twice, Grady asked a question. They did not hurry him. There were pauses between the questions, apparently to give him time to think of answers—to change answers. But, as time went on, the questions seemed to pulsate in his mind, as blood pulsates through an artery. Was it this way? Was it this way? How did this man know? Did you tell someone? And always, there was disbelief in the questions, and in the voices. U
tter disbelief—and utter patience.

  Weariness dragged at John’s mind. He could not keep his mind alert. There was a dullness in his thoughts which was almost a physical pressure—on his eyes, on the cords of his neck. He began to find it hard to remember which of the men was which; it began to seem that the questions came all from one man with different voices, and a man he could no longer clearly see—a man who wavered dimly in a smoky turbulence of air.

  But still, as if from a great distance, he answered the questions—answered them dully, but stubbornly. When the men (who were one man) went to other things, he answered doggedly. How did he explain the shirts? How did he explain the check? How did he explain— Again, the questions were over and over repeated. “I don’t know. I can’t explain. Somebody has made these things look the way they do. I never saw the girl before. I never—”

  Then there was what seemed a long time without questions. The men still were there. They still looked at him and he still, through strained, aching eyes, looked back at them. He watched their mouths, to see if their lips moved, if they spoke and he could not hear.

  “All right,” he heard Miller say, in his soft voice, from far off. “All right. We’re getting nowhere now. Give him a place to sleep, Grady. You want to sleep a while, Mr. Hayward?”

  John went with Grady, to a place to sleep. It was only when they wakened him, after what seemed a few minutes and was actually about three hours, that he fully realized he had slept in a cell, with a heavy door locked on him. It was the detective named Shapiro who wakened him and told him he could send out for breakfast, if he wanted breakfast. John sent out for breakfast and cigarettes and when food came—apparently from a near-by lunchroom, coffee in a cardboard container, egg sandwich on a cardboard plate—he drank coffee and ate the sandwich. He lighted a cigarette.

  His mind was clear again. A certain resilience had come back to it. Toward the end of the questioning, he thought, I must have been in what they call shock. Briefly, but with a sudden coldness of the mind, he wondered whether, in that long period when consciousness wavered, he had said any of the condemning things they had been trying to get him to say. But then, as suddenly, he was certain he had not. He smoked and waited for them to come back, and was wary and alert as a cat is when dogs circle it.

  It was Shapiro who came back, and opened the cell door and did not close it. Shapiro looked at him sadly.

  He said, “Feeling better, now?” and when John nodded, Shapiro said there was nothing like a cup of coffee.

  “Not like this one,” John said, tasting the flavor of soaked cardboard still in his mouth, meeting Shapiro halfway. Shapiro smiled dimly and said Mr. Hayward had something there. Then he said they wanted Mr. Hayward should go on a little ride with them, and that maybe he’d want to clean up first. He waited until John came out of the cell and then, walking beside him, but a step behind, not touching him but evidently ready to touch him, directed John to a small washroom off a room which held several desks, with men at two of the desks. John had never seen them before. They looked at him, as he went through the room. They looked at him as if they planned to remember his face.

  Shapiro brought John an electric razor and, when John said he had never used one, Shapiro said, without emphasis, that that was funny, but did not say why it was funny. He showed John how to use the razor, and John did, finding the process awkward but more effective than he had supposed it would be. He washed and put back on the shirt he had worn the night before. It did not feel clean. There was nothing to do about his suit, in which he had slept. (I never slept in my clothes before, John thought.) He felt, momentarily, at a disadvantage and then that, under the circumstances, there could be no disadvantage more trivial.

  With Shapiro still beside him, and a step—or half a step—behind, he went back through the room with the desks. Grady was at one of them, now, and stood up, and walked on the other side of John. They went out of the station house into the sun. It was another pleasant, early spring day. They got into a car, Shapiro behind the wheel and John and Grady in the back seat. They did not drive far. They stopped midway of a block in East Eleventh Street, in front of an apartment house which was neither very new nor very old.

  “Look familiar, Mr. Hayward?” Grady asked, as they got out.

  “The answer’s the same,” John said. “I never saw it before. I suppose this is where the girl lived?”

  Neither of them answered, except that Shapiro nodded. They went across the sidewalk and into the lobby of the building. It was carpeted, not large. Toward the rear a big man—a softly fat man in a blue shirt open at the throat and khaki trousers—was running a vacuum cleaner over the carpet. He stopped the cleaner when they went in. It was dim in the lobby, but enough daylight came through the door behind, and fell on the man’s face, for John to see that he had never seen the man before—and that the man needed a shave.

  The man looked at the two detectives. Then he looked at John Hayward.

  “That’s him,” the man said. “About the time I said. A little while after three.”

  “You’re sure, Pedersen?” Grady said. “You wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

  “That’s him,” the fat man said. “Saw him just as plain as I’m seeing him now. I was standing right about here.” He moved a step forward and continued to look at John. “Think I don’t know what I saw?” he asked. His voice was querulous. It was, John thought, the voice of a man who felt himself too often unfairly doubted.

  “If you say you saw me—” John said, and Grady interrupted him.

  “All right,” Grady said. “We know what you’re going to say. We’ll go up, now.”

  They waited for John to move. He looked around the lobby and saw the door of an elevator. But Grady had already moved toward it. He pressed a button and the door opened and he went into the elevator. John followed him, and then Shapiro. Again the two men waited, and then John realized that he was closest to the row of buttons which controlled the automatic elevator.

  “All right,” Grady said, “let’s get going.”

  They waited again. John knew what they waited for.

  “Which floor is it?” he asked.

  “Smart cooky,” Grady said, and reached around him and pressed the button numbered “5.”

  “I suppose,” John said, “the man downstairs—the janitor or whatever he is—says he saw me come in yesterday afternoon?”

  “That’s right,” Grady said. “About three-fifteen. Thereabouts.”

  “He’s lying,” John said.

  “Oh,” Grady said, “for God’s sake, Mr. Hayward. Why?”

  The elevator stopped. The door opened. John stepped out first and waited, just beyond the door.

  “All right,” Grady said. “You made your point. You don’t know what floor. You don’t know it’s apartment 5-B. This way, Mr. Hayward.”

  There was a uniformed patrolman outside the door of apartment 5-B. He opened the door for them. He had, John thought, been waiting for them.

  There was a small, railed foyer just inside the door. From it, they went down two steps into the living room. The arrangement was familiar. Some years before, John remembered, the “sunken” living rooms had been popular, at least among people who build apartment houses. John had been in a good many apartments almost identical with this. (You could “dine” on the foyer platform. Apartments like this had a name. He could not remember the name.)

  “Familiar?” Grady said.

  “I’ve never been here before,” John said.

  Near the center of the living room there was, in chalk, the rough outline of a human body. The arms of the body had been, apparently, flung out.

  “Yes,” Grady said, “that’s where she was lying. Her hair was a little damp around the edges. Hadn’t got it all in the shower cap. Remember that, Mr. Hayward? Hair was a little darker where it was wet. She say anything when she saw you were going to kill her, Mr. Hayward? Try to scream, maybe?”

  John looked at the chalked outline. He r
emembered the slender white body on the table in the morgue.

  “Or didn’t she know soon enough?” Grady said. “Maybe she thought you were going to make love to her. Was that the way it was?”

  It might have been that way, John thought. A girl hurrying toward her lover. Not caring if, as she hurried, the light robe opened from her body. And thinking the strong hands held out toward her were still a lover’s hands.

  “It’s no good, Grady,” John said. “I wasn’t the one who killed her.”

  “Rented the apartment,” Grady said. “Came here yesterday afternoon about the time she was killed. Couldn’t let her mess up your marrying the boss’s daughter.”

  “No,” John said, steadily.

  “Come here, Mr. Hayward,” Grady said. He walked across the room, across the chalked outline. John walked around the place where the girl had died. Grady stood by a table. There were daffodils on it in a vase. There was a framed photograph.

  Grady pointed at the photograph—an enlarged snapshot—a snapshot of John Hayward, dressed (apparently) for tennis; a snapshot of John smiling, his eyes crinkled a little, with just a suggestion that the sun was on them. The background was hazy, out of focus.

  They did not hurry him. They merely watched him, and, knowing himself watched, he tried to keep from showing in his face the swirling confusion in his mind. But he could feel that there was a fixity in the expression of his eyes; he could feel the muscles around his eyes tightening, setting in tightness.

  “Well,” Grady said finally, “a picture of you, isn’t it? You don’t say it isn’t a picture of you?”

  John was not certain of his voice; he was not certain of anything. Questions pounded in his mind. He shook his head. He couldn’t say it wasn’t a picture of John Hayward. (A picture taken—where? when? And—who had taken it?)

  “You got an explanation?” Grady said. “You never saw this girl. You were never in the apartment. And she had your picture. Stood it up here on the table so she could—”