The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  John did not, looking into the mirror, finally turning away from it, fight against the realization that, at any rate superficially, he resembled almost everybody he knew. But, for the first time in his life, he did acutely realize it. And it made a starting point. He held to that, pushing away, as well as he could, the swirl of problems which must, eventually, be faced. (What would be the attitude at the bank? What would his father, retired and in Florida, think when the astounding news reached him there? Suspected of murder, does one communicate with friends, pleading innocence? He had a weekend engagement with the Fawcetts in Chappaqua. Should he telephone his apologies, explaining that something (murder) had come up? And there was Barbara—but least of all, yet, could he think of Barbara.)

  He dressed. He went into the living room and opened windows, and let the spring air in. Someone who looked like him—that was the starting point. Someone who, standing in a hall with the light behind him, could be mistaken for John Hayward. It was best, provisionally, to presume an honest mistake by the elderly, fat janitor—best to assume that only one man had plotted.

  (For an instant, then, without warning, as he stood in the familiarity of the living room, the strange fear swept again through John’s mind. If he could remember everything, would that other living room also be familiar? As familiar as this? For that instant, darkness seemed to eddy in his mind. John put a hand on the desk by which he was standing, steadying himself in the darkness. The fear passed, but for some seconds a kind of mental emptiness was left behind. Then, again, he was John Hayward, who had lived only one life. The objects of that life were tangible about him.)

  He sat down at the desk and opened it. A man who looked as he did, and could write as he did. He reached into a drawer in which he kept his most recently canceled checks. For a moment be groped, and then found the bundle of checks at the back of the drawer, which was not its proper place.

  So, John thought—of course they would. They had done it very well; the desk was not disordered; there was no obvious disorder in the apartment. But by the time he had gone through the canceled checks, the searcher had forgotten exactly where in the drawer he had found them.

  John took out several of the checks and examined his own signature, as he had examined his own face. He had, at first, much the same difficulty in examining objectively. After he had looked at the signature several times, he managed to see it as a name handwritten—any name. It was a simple signature, firm and legible, lacking in idiosyncrasy. He didn’t, John thought, seem to have many idiosyncrasies of any kind. The signature varied somewhat from check to check; it would, John decided, be difficult to prove, even with expert opinion, that the signature on the other checks—those made out to the real estate company—were forged. Experts would, no doubt, be found to differ from one another; they usually could be.

  The telephone rang. A newspaper reporter would like a statement; he would like to come around and get an interview. John said a firm “no” to the last request; he considered the first, briefly. He said, “I never saw Miss Evans alive. I know nothing about her death.” “Then—” the reporter said. “Period,” John said.

  The call was the first of several calls, of the same import. John said the same to each. The woman of the Journal-American was insistent. She said John ought to give his side; there was an intimation that, if he proved stubborn, he could not blame newspapers for what they printed. “I can sue them,” John said, and hung up. He did not know whether this was the way to go about it. He lacked experience. And, he did not want interruptions. After the fifth telephone call, John did not cradle the telephone. He laid it on the desk.

  He began to walk restlessly around the room. He felt need, urgent need, for immediate action, but he could not decide what the action should be. He would have to get another lawyer, of course. Perhaps Dick Still could suggest— John shook his head. He would get a lawyer of another type; a type which Dick Still presumably would not suggest. Tomorrow—he would get a lawyer tomorrow.

  And, John thought, the lawyer will take the case and do what he can and—he won’t believe me. He will listen, and he will nod (because I am paying him) instead of shaking his head, as Miller did, as the others did. But he will think what they thought. Probably he will say, as they said, “You’re saying the wrong thing, Mr. Hayward. There’s no use saying you didn’t know the girl. Why don’t we—”

  For the first time, now that he was quiet, free to think step by step, in an orderly fashion, John Hayward realized that nobody was going to believe him. That was it—nobody in the world would believe that he had not known Nora Evans, had not rented an apartment for her. That, with premeditation, he had murdered her—some might doubt that. That he had not gone to the apartment that afternoon—some might believe that, in spite of Pedersen, the janitor. (After all, the light had been behind John, not on his face.) That there was another murderer—even that some might believe. But the simple, puzzling truth—that nobody would believe, for the equally simple reason that it was preposterous.

  Because, John thought—now sitting in a chair, letting a cigarette go out, staring with blank eyes at a familiar wall—because it means that somebody hated me enough to kill a girl to get at me, in the end to get me killed. Nobody will believe that. I am not the kind of man anyone would hate so much, and so deviously. And then, with a sudden coldness in his mind, he realized something else. I, John Hayward thought, do not believe it either. It is beyond belief.

  With that thought, uneasiness returned to his mind, and again it seemed that all that was real—which he knew to be real—was dissolving about him, in swirling fantasy. It was like nothing which had ever before happened in his mind—a thing for which nothing in his previous life had in any way prepared him. The very orderliness of his life left him, now, vulnerable to this incomprehensible disorder which had overtaken him. Again, that irrational fear that what could not be believed in could not, finally, be true, fluttered in his mind. But now the fear was formless. Any form it might take would be insupportable.

  He stood up, abruptly. Almost physically he shook himself. Harshly, he drove his mind back to the world of logic, of order—drove it out of this fantasy of fear—the fear which was like a swirling of darkness around a horrid thing, a thing too hideous to be looked at.

  After a moment—but the passage of time was not of the kind a clock can measure—John was free of the dark fears. This, however, left him with apprehensions at once more tangible and more immediate. He would, he told himself, have to quit imagining horrors. Things were tough enough without that. He’d never seen the girl before. He had never been in the Eleventh Street apartment before. (That, entering it, he had felt it vaguely familiar meant only that he had been often in similar apartments.) Certainly, he had never killed anyone. (As an artillery officer in Korea he had, of course, planned to kill, but that did not enter into it. Also, results had not been certain, or visibly personal.)

  What was immediately indicated, John decided, was that he do something. It was evident that there were a good many things, none of them particularly pleasant, which would have to be done. For one thing, he would have to face the people at the bank.

  That this could be avoided did not occur to John Hayward. The bank was as much a part of his life as any other part; as much, now, a thing to be brought into some sort of adjustment. He looked at his watch, and found it was just three-thirty. He would go down to the bank and—well, what, absurdly, it came to, tell them he had not killed a girl named Nora Evans. It was a preposterous thing to have to tell Martin Phillips, senior vice president of the Cotton Exchange National Bank.

  John went to the hall closet for his hat. (A junior executive does not go hatless to his bank, however un-hatted he may go at other times.) He took the hat off the shelf and was closing the door when he saw, on a hanger, a sports jacket he had never seen before. It was more noticeable than any he owned, or would have thought of choosing. It was pushed to one side of the closet—not by any means hidden, but, equally, not obtrusive
ly in sight.

  A little dazedly, John took the jacket off the hanger and looked at it. It was a brown-green tweed, dark but rather boldly patterned. Hardly knowing why he did so, John looked for the maker’s name. There was no maker’s name. John turned the jacket in his hands. Finally, he put it on. It fitted—not perfectly, but well enough; as well as most sports jackets fitted.

  There was a small object in the change pocket in the right-hand pocket. Almost before he touched it, John knew what it would be. It would be a key. It was a key. There was, he realized, no doubt what lock the key would fit. He took the jacket off and looked at it again.

  The jacket was meant to be recognizable. Somewhere there was a person—or several people—who would recognize it. That was, clearly, what it was for. How it had got in his hall closet—

  But that, too, was obvious. Somebody—this other “John Hayward”—had access to the apartment. That was how he had come by the shirts, and the less identifiable underwear shorts. Since there was nothing to indicate that he had forced a lock, and since there was no convenient fire escape, he had either been let in or had got himself a key. By whom, if the one thing was true, and how, if the other, would have to be found out.

  This other “John Hayward” had left the jacket for the police to find. But—there was no indication that they had found it. Yet, they had surely searched the apartment; they could hardly have avoided seeing the jacket. Had they left it, with the key in the pocket, for some reason of their own? Did they, perhaps, hope he would try to dispose of jacket and of key?

  It was not clear. John hung the jacket again in the closet. He started out. He went back and took the key out of the jacket pocket. On the way downtown to the bank, in a cab, he put the key with his own on his key chain. Perhaps that was what he was supposed to do; perhaps he was playing into the other’s hands. But there was no way of knowing. And he might have a use for the key.

  IV

  The main doors of the bank were closed, and heavy wire mesh was locked across them. John walked past them to another door, and a uniformed guard looked out at him through the glass. The guard opened the door and said, in a voice so noticeably matter of fact as to be entirely unreal, “Good afternoon, sir.” John said, “Afternoon, Barney,” and went into the bank, and was conscious that the guard had turned and was looking after him.

  John walked, and was conscious that he walked a little stiffly, through the bank’s wide concourse, with the tellers’ low, ornamentally screened, counters on either side. Few looked up as he walked along the concourse and those who did looked, rather quickly, down again at their work.

  He went through the gate which led to the general offices and along a narrow corridor between closely set desks; through another gate into another general office, but one in which the desks were set at a dignified distance from one another, so that there was room for each to have beside it a chair for those who came to confer. One of these desks, in a preferred position, near a window, was John Hayward’s. His name was on it. His name was still on it.

  Not all the desks in this more rarefied area were occupied, but some were and their possessors looked up. They did not, as the tellers had, look embarrassedly away again; they greeted him with nods, with smiles fixed carefully noncommittal. It was as if they waited introduction to a stranger. Then Henry Roberts got up from a desk near John’s and came between desks, his hand held out ahead of him and a smile, which almost reached his eyes, firmly on his familiar face. By the time he reached John, and shook his hand, the smile had grown rigid. But it was still there.

  He shook John’s hand firmly, and at first without words, John waited for the words.

  “Just wanted you to know—” Roberts said, and shook even more firmly the hand he held. “What I mean is—” He let go of John’s hand. “Hell,” he said, “what can a guy say?”

  “I don’t know, Hank,” John said, and looked at Henry Roberts’s eyes. He had, in recent hours, looked into the eyes of a good many people—of policemen, of a man trained in law, of an elevator operator. You could tell more than he had realized from looking at people’s eyes. There was a kind of flatness about the eyes of those who did not believe you—and a kind of wariness. That look was in Henry Roberts’s eyes. Well, John thought, he had a try at it.

  “I never saw this girl before,” John said.

  “Sure you didn’t,” Henry Roberts said, but now he gave up the effort to meet John’s eyes. “All some damn’ fool mistake. Well—” He stopped. He was not equal to this. He doesn’t, John thought, know how to get out of this.

  “Mr. Phillips still around?” John asked, and saw relief flicker in Roberts’s eyes.

  “Think he is,” Roberts said, and spoke quickly, with relief. “Pretty sure he is. Like me to—”

  “No,” John said. “I’ll just barge in.”

  “Best way,” Roberts said. “Well, good luck.” He took hold of John’s hand and almost at once released it. “Just wanted you to know—” he said, and stopped again.

  “Sure,” John said. “I appreciate that, Hank.”

  He went on between the desks. Heads had been raised from work while he talked to Henry Roberts. Now they were bent over work again. He came to a corridor and went down it to a door near the end. The door had Martin Phillips’s name on it. John opened the door and went in, and Miriam Lacey looked up at him. She had blue eyes, which grew wide. It was surprising how much one could tell from eyes.

  “Oh—Mr. Hayward,” she said. “I—”

  “Forget it, Miriam,” John said. “Is he?” He indicated, with a movement of his head, the private office beyond.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m afraid somebody’s with him.” It was evident she was embarrassed. “That is, someone from—”

  The door to the private office opened. The man who came out of it was familiar.

  “Hello, Mr. Hayward,” Detective Grady said. He was quite affable. “Keep running into each other, don’t we?”

  John nodded.

  “Way things are,” Grady said. “Well—’afternoon, Miss Lacey.”

  He went out, then. He had left the door to the private office open.

  “Come in, Hayward,” Martin Phillips said.

  John went in.

  Martin Phillips was sixty-one. He had gray hair, thick, smoothly brushed; he was a big man, sitting broad-shouldered behind a spreading desk. He wore a dark gray suit; he held nose-glasses in his left hand and watched John cross a dozen feet of carpeted floor in the big corner office. The light from the corner window was on John’s face.

  “Sit down, Hayward,” Phillips said; and waited while John sat down. “This is bad business,” Phillips said.

  Phillips had gray eyes. They were noticeably without expression, at least during banking hours. They were without expression now.

  “Yes,” John said, “it’s a very bad business, sir.”

  “They tell me,” Phillips said, “that you deny even knowing this—this girl.”

  “Nora Evans,” John said. “Yes, I do deny that, Mr. Phillips.”

  “Yes,” Phillips said. “And, that you seem to have rented an apartment for her. Paying by check on the Riverside.”

  “And that I left shirts in the apartment,” John said. “And that the janitor identified me. Apparently Grady has—” He hesitated. “Filled you in, sir,” he said.

  “It seems,” Phillips said, “that the police think you are making an error in judgment, Hayward. By this complete denial. It seems to puzzle them.”

  “Yes,” John said.

  “And I suppose,” Phillips said, “that now you want to know where you stand. With the bank.”

  It did not appear that he expected an answer.

  “This detective,” he said, “had the same question. Among others, of course. I told him that your reputation here was good. That we would find it difficult to believe you would be involved in—anything of this nature.”

  “Well,” John said, “thank you, sir.”

  And he look
ed into Phillips’s expressionless gray eyes. The eyes did not evade his; they were not, as Roberts’s had been, embarrassed eyes.

  “I do find it difficult to believe,” Phillips said. “But—can you explain the circumstances, Hayward?”

  “Somebody has framed me,” John said. “Arranged these things.”

  There was no expression in Martin Phillips’s eyes. He nodded his head slowly, but there was no acceptance in the movement; it was not affirmative; it indicated words heard and recorded.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” John said. He paused. “I realize,” he said, “that it isn’t easy to believe.”

  “No,” Phillips said. “It isn’t a likely story. Our position is difficult, Hayward.”

  “So is mine,” John said. “Rather the more difficult of the two.”

  “Yes. In any event, you’re still an employee of the Cotton Exchange. I told the detective that.” John waited. “On leave, of course. With full compensation, of course.”

  “In other words,” John said, “you bide your time.”

  Phillips raised his heavy eyebrows slightly. He said, “If you want to put it that way.”

  It had been a lapse from formality, from the proper ordering of words.

  “I’m sorry,” John said. But he did not feel particularly sorry. “I should have said, ‘You reserve judgment.’”

  “Don’t,” Phillips said, “think I am unsympathetic. Under other circumstances—” He did not finish. “You have the Thayer matter in hand,” he said. “And—the Tushingham Trust, isn’t it?” He waited for John to nod his head. “You might,” he said, “bring Roberts up to date on them.”