The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  The bus stopped at Thirty-sixth and Fifth and Shapiro got off. He moved, dispiritedly, eastward. He’d just have a look around, and there wouldn’t be anything to find, and he’d go home. (Only, by now, Rosie would have walked the dog.)

  He went into the apartment house. The elevator was at the lobby floor. The operator said, “Oh, it’s you again,” and Shapiro said, “That’s right.” Then he said, “Mr. Hayward got company?”

  “Girl went up. You want to go up?”

  For answer, Shapiro got into the elevator. The operator closed the door with a bang.

  “Just now?” Shapiro said.

  “Quite a while ago,” the man said, which left Nathan Shapiro uncertain whether “quite a while” meant hours or minutes. It probably didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get anywhere.

  “Suppose,” Shapiro said, “you let me off at the fourth. I’ll walk the rest.”

  XIV

  She continued to look at him, to look into his strange, blank eyes. He repeated it, in the same harsh voice: “You’d better go home.” He said, “There’s nothing you can do.”

  For seconds, she merely looked at him; looked at him, and tried to find him.

  “No,” she said then. “Not until you tell me what’s happened. What it’s all about.”

  Her voice was quite clear, now, and quite steady. Her body was no longer trembling.

  “You want it spelled out,” he said. “That’s what you want?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I want, John.”

  He shook his head, just perceptibly. For an instant, his eyes were no longer blank; for that instant it seemed as if blankness he was desperately maintaining in his eyes had parted, as curtains might part although they were drawn tight against stirring air. But the blankness returned so quickly that she could not be sure it had ever broken.

  “It ought to be obvious,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do. You made a mistake.” He paused. “What it comes to,” he said, “you backed the wrong horse.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that. That doesn’t spell it out.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I appreciate it. Everything you tried. You’re a nice girl. Go home. You’re better off at home.” He paused again. She looked at his hands, and saw them clenched. “Safer,” he said.

  “You appreciate it,” she said. “Did you really say that? To me? You appreciate what I’ve done?” He nodded. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  He moved. He had been standing with his back to the windows. He turned a little, and now she could, as he stood in profile toward the windows, see more clearly the fixed blankness in his face.

  “All right,” he said. “They’re too many for me. There are too many of them and they’re too good.” He spoke, now, more loudly than he had spoken before. “Do you hear me?” he said, in the loud, harsh voice. “I can’t get away with it.”

  “Get away with it?” she said. She looked up into his blank eyes, and again thought the blankness wavered for an instant.

  “I needed a drink,” he said, still loudly. “You know how it is, sometimes, when you have a drink? The fuzz rubs off. Everything gets all clear. You can’t fool yourself any more. I had a couple of drinks—maybe I had three or four drinks. I said, It’s no good. They’ve got you.’ So—”

  “You’re sick,” she said. “That’s what’s the matter.”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe a little drunk. Drunk enough to get things clear. It’s no good. Why don’t you get out of here? Go off and—get over it. Because—”

  “No,” she said. “You’ll have to say it.”

  “That I did what they say? All right. I’ll—”

  But he broke off. He turned quickly and crossed the narrow room to a desk against the wall, between the doors. He sat at the desk and wrote, rapidly, with a fountain pen on a sheet of paper. She watched his back, could see his moving hand. He wrote very briefly. He came back and stood by her, and had moved violently.

  “Spell it out,” he said. “You wanted it spelled out, didn’t you? Spell it out and sign it. Better than just telling you. Write it down and sign it.”

  She waited. And now, again, her body trembled.

  “Listen,” John Hayward said. “Read it to you.” He was almost shouting in the harsh voice. “Reads this way: ‘I killed Julie Titus because she tried to shake me down. I killed the old lady—’”

  He stopped suddenly. He held the paper out to her.

  “See?” he said. “All signed. Read it. Barbara—read it!”

  Her hands were numb; her body was numb. She held out a numb hand and took the paper.

  What he had read was not written on the paper. There were four words on the paper. They wavered on the paper. They came clear on the paper.

  “For God’s sake go.”

  “All right,” he said, quickly and loudly. “That’s the way it is. That’s what I am. Get out before something else—”

  His eyes were alive, now. They leapt with life. She looked up from the words on the sheet of paper, and his eyes seemed frighteningly alive—and demanding.

  She made her face quiet, tightened her trembling lips against an answer.

  “All right,” she said, and made her voice expressionless. “I’ll go, John. I’ll—” She turned away. Her mind swirled. She took a few steps, moving through danger vibrating in the air, but yet not to be understood. She started to put the paper on a table near the center of the living room.

  There were drinking glasses on the table. There were two glasses on the table.

  For an instant her whole body seemed to freeze. She could not complete even the simple action of putting the paper down on the table. She stood staring at the glasses—stood too long, and knew she stood too long, and could not, for seconds, force herself to put the paper on the table. Then she put it there, and there was a sound and she turned, her back to the table, her numb hands on it.

  John had moved near her, although she had not heard him. And one of the doors she faced was open. A man stood there, with the light behind him, so that his face was shadowed. Standing so, he might have been John Hayward—or any other quite ordinary-looking man. But he had a revolver in his right hand.

  “Silly thing to forget, Johnny,” the man—a man she had never seen before, but had seen everywhere—said in a light, rather pleasant voice. “Tough on the young lady the finesse didn’t work. But that’s the way—”

  He raised the revolver. In that same instant, John leaped, not toward the man in the doorway across the room, but toward Barbara Phillips. He was between her and the man in the door. His body jarred hard against hers, and his arms came around her as he made himself a wall between her and the slowly pointing revolver in the man’s hand.

  In that instant, she did not breathe, and then there was a violent noise in the room and she felt John’s body leap convulsively against her, and then whirl away. She could, then, see the man in the doorway. He was looking at his empty hand. Ridiculously, as if he had bruised a finger, he shook a shattered hand, and blood splattered from it to the carpet.

  “All right, mister,” a weary, a sad, voice said from the end of the living room—from the door between the living room and the outside corridor. “If you hold it up, it won’t bleed so much.”

  A tall man came sadly into the room. He shook his head.

  “Not the shot I used to be,” he said. “Should just have hit the gun.”

  She was shaking. She was swallowing, convulsively, against something rising in her throat. She looked at John.

  “That’s right,” John said. “You never met Mr. Woodson, did you, Barbara? Mr. Pit Woodson? Mr. P. I. T., for Peter Irving Titus, Woodson?” He looked at Woodson. “I’m afraid,” John said, slowly, “that Mr. Woodson can’t offer to shake hands.” He turned to Shapiro, then.

  “And where the hell,” John said in a strange voice, “did you come from, Mr. Shapiro?”

  Pit Woodson had been waiting in the
apartment when, at about five-thirty, after garaging the car, John had let himself into it. Woodson had already made himself a drink, and in all respects comfortable. He had come to persuade John to write a “nice little confession.”

  “With this, Johnny,” Woodson had said, and waggled the revolver. “Make yourself a drink, Johnny. Good, stiff drink.” He had waggled the revolver again, and John had made himself a drink. “Sit down, Johnny,” Woodson had said, and once more waggled the revolver, and John had sat down. Like the rest of it, the last had had a certain dream-like quality.

  “So the ‘T’ stands for Titus,” John had said, and took a swallow of his drink and Pit had said, “That’s smart of you, Johnny,” and drank from his own glass.

  “I told him,” John said to Barbara, “that he had gone a long way around and—believe it or not—he went into a little discussion of how you had to plan your whole strategy from the first card you played. Told me that that was what had been wrong with my bridge. Speaking of me in the past tense.”

  “Past perfect,” Barbara said.

  They were back at Monet’s, side by side on a banquette in a corner. They were not particularly hungry and John, certainly, was not thirsty—he had actually had three stiff drinks while waiting for Pit Woodson to get around to killing him—but Monet’s, particularly in the evening, was a quiet place. They needed a quiet place.

  “The plan was what we thought,” John said. “He let me go over it, and agreed to all of it. He had chosen me because—well, he said, ‘You fitted the bill, Johnny.’ He made something of a point of having nothing against me personally. I went into a lot of detail—to postpone being killed—and he let me talk and kept saying, ‘Smart of you, Johnny.’”

  John paused. He looked at the drink he had hardly tasted, and shook his head at it.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “I didn’t give you any credit, Barbara. I didn’t think credit would—do you any good. Under the circumstances.”

  “You were to write the confession and then—then kill yourself? I mean, seem to have killed yourself?”

  That had been the plan. Woodson had been almost apologetic about it. He had, however, been quite reasonable. Johnny—the implication of “good old Johnny” was in the tone—would see how it was. The police wouldn’t see the obvious, and act on it. He couldn’t himself, see what they had been waiting for. Or, specifically, why they had turned John loose at Hawthorne. He had, frankly, considered this damn’ inefficient of the police.

  “My God, Johnny,” Pit Woodson said, “I gave them enough. Wouldn’t you say I’d given them enough?”

  He had seemed, John said, to seek sympathy for the trouble he’d gone to, and the lack of appreciation the police had shown. “Actually,” John said. “That’s the way he sounded.”

  But Woodson had kept the revolver very ready. When the telephone had rung, he had shaken his head and moved the gun from side to side. And time had begun to run out. Finally, Woodson had said that this was all very well, but they’d better get on with it.

  “Just write it that you killed them,” Woodson said. “Just do that, Johnny.”

  “I asked him why I should,” John said. “Since, to make the confession any good, he would have to kill me anyway. He was good enough to say I had a point there.”

  “He’s—unbelievable,” Barbara said. At that, John shook his head. He said he had, in the last few days, learned to believe the unbelievable without half trying.

  “You know,” he said, “I still feel that I’ve been turned upside down. Things aren’t—I’m not sure of the order of things, any more.”

  “You thought the world was domesticated,” she said. “At bottom. Oh—that there was anger and violence, and terrible great quarrels, but that things are predictable. Most men do. Why would you sign a confession, if he was going to kill you anyway? Would you have?”

  John didn’t know. On the whole, he thought he might have. You played for time—for minutes, down to seconds. Something might happen—while you stayed alive. Of course, something had.

  “You rang the doorbell,” John told her. “That was what happened.”

  John had been told to get rid of whoever it was. He had tried. Woodson had moved to the door of the bedroom, and stood there with the revolver on John. “And,” John said, “on you. As you came in, he closed the door—almost closed it. What I tried—well, it’s pretty obvious what I tried.”

  “Because,” she said, “he’d have had to kill me, too. Make it appear—oh, that I’d found out, that you’d killed me, and then confessed and killed yourself?”

  John didn’t see what else Woodson could have done, being Woodson. He would have had to try—well, to drop the outstanding trumps. John had managed, letting Barbara in, to leave the apartment door on latch, just on the chance. The chance had been—

  “Look,” Barbara said, and indicated with her head. She indicated a tall man, who seemed to droop, who was standing near the door and looked around the dimly lit room. He saw what he was looking for, and came toward them.

  “Evening, Miss Phillips,” Shapiro said, unhappily. “Mr. Hayward. Miller’d like to see you, Mr. Hayward.”

  They looked at him. John half rose.

  “Oh,” Shapiro said. “No hurry about it. Just like to fill in a few things. About what Mr. Woodson told you—things like that. Any time tomorrow that’s convenient.”

  For a moment, John remained, as if frozen, half standing, half not.

  “It will have to be in the morning,” Barbara Phillips said. “Because tomorrow afternoon we have to go to the Municipal Building.” John, still in his odd crouch, looked at her. “To get the license,” Barbara said.

  John looked at her. He looked at Nathan Shapiro.

  “Mr. Shapiro,” John Hayward said, “can I please buy you a drink?”

  Shapiro thought he might, so long as he made it wine.

  “Anything stronger,” Shapiro said, “upsets my stomach.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Nathan Shapiro Mysteries

  I

  A jet-fighter, on routine training flight, knifed out of the white innocence of a cloud over Arizona at a little after two o’clock on an afternoon in mid-October. In that instant it was too late. The plane was a bullet, its course predestined. It took the big transport amidships. For seconds, then, the transport was a sheet of paper, swirled and tattered in a great wind. Then it was a burst of fire in the sky. Then it was nothing except a rain of metal, and not of metal only.

  Forty-three men and women were dead by then, among them Captain Kenneth Williams, pilot, age thirty-six, resident of Glenville, Connecticut, survived by a wife.

  Not on all nights, but for many nights and for months after-ward, Lois Williams would wake in a world of fire, and as often as not wake with the sound of screaming in her ears. At first, when this happened, she would lie, sometimes until morning, and lie dry-eyed, as if a flame—a flame she had never seen—had seared her eyeballs. Later—when it was getting better, easier to bear, as they promised her it would—she would turn on her pillow and hold to the pillow and lie sobbing. As more time passed it became usual for her to go to sleep again, which was another sign that “they” were right. As time passed, they told her—as time passed.

  She would, in the natural course of things, have much time to pass, being young, being twenty-five the spring after her husband died. She would “pick things up again,” they told her; “make a new life for herself,” they told her. Forsythia turned itself to sunlight, and tulips opened all the same, and there were the customary things to do in a small, modern house in a development of modern houses—many of them brightly colored—in the ancient village of Glenville. There was no special point in doing the things, but they were there to do. For the time being, that would be. Until, when it began to seem worth the trouble, she went somewhere else and away from memories. (As if she ever would, ever could.)

  The ones who promised her that, as always happened, the passing of time would dull, were
for the most part also the wives of airplane pilots. There was a colony of pilots and their wives in Glenville, which is a pleasant and quiet town sixty miles or a little more from the City of New York. The women—young women, with, for the most part, young children—called themselves a variety of things; “sky wives” was the most common. They said, as was of course inevitable, that they “flocked together.” They spoke of themselves, collectively, as “the flock.”

  Until the two airplanes met and flared over Arizona, Lois had known almost no one in Glenville who was not one of “the flock.” There had been no need to know others, and it was also true that to some extent others were outsiders; people who talked differently about different things; women whose husbands, if they went to the city at all, went by the 7:58 out of Glenville and returned, for the most part, on the 5:02 out of Grand Central. The pilots also, on occasion, took the 7:58. But by the time the 5:02 closed its gates they were almost anywhere—anywhere but Glenville.

  “The flock” did not, certainly, shut Lois out when she was no longer, in the real sense, one of them. On the contrary, they made rather a point of bringing her in—of rallying around. But the trouble was that, after the first numbness lessened, memories rallied too, so that being with them but yet not one of them, became almost unbearable. Yet there was, still, time to pass. And she was not yet ready, in May, to plan ahead—to leave Glenville, as inevitably she sometime would, and find new people in new places.

  She did not, certainly, plan to involve herself in the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Town of Glenville, of which the village of Glenville was the center. That happened without plan—happened because of something said by the town librarian, and something answered idly, and the leading of one thing to another. That, and the need to pass the time—let time run through fingers. (Fingers never again to be touched by remembered fingers, held against remembered lips.) The summer’s celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Glenville, under the British crown, would, if a jet-fighter had come out of a cloud’s concealment a few seconds later, or seconds sooner, have been something that Lois Williams might have read about in the Glenville Advertiser. (And probably would not have read too much about, because it was so much about yesterday, and what did yesterday matter?)