Shadow of Guilt

by Patrick Quentin

  I finished my drink and put the empty glass down on Connie’s desk. What I’d put it down on was the Times magazine section, still opened at the crossword puzzle which Connie and Miss Taylor had done together and which Trant had studied so carefully. I glanced down at Connie’s familiar messy writing and Miss Taylor’s neat letters, legible as neon signs.

  The puzzle was completely finished. That was the first thing I noticed. Then, as if drawn by magnetism, my eyes fell on the clue for number eight down. A goddess of war in seven letters. My eyes flashed up to the puzzle itself. There was the answer written in, in Miss Taylor’s unmistakable capitals: BELLONA.

  As I looked at the word, I felt myself spinning dizzily back in time. I was coming here into the library around five on Sunday afternoon. Connie was sitting in the red leather chair, her reading glasses on, glancing up at me with her bright, unperturbed smile.

  Hello, dear. Who was a goddess of war in seven letters beginning with B?

  Five o’clock! Half an hour: after Miss Taylor was supposed to have left! And Connie hadn’t known who the goddess of war was then; the puzzle hadn’t been finished then. So!

  This shock was so enormous that for a moment I couldn’t force my swirling thoughts into any sense. But gradually the pattern emerged. Connie’s alibi for herself had been as fake as our alibi for Ala and our alibi for me. On Sunday Miss Taylor had never been at the house at all. Connie had merely gone to her later and made her fill in the puzzle to provide Trant at just the right moment with the magnificently casual and convincing piece of evidence of the two female buddies sitting cozily together on a family Sunday afternoon, taking turns writing in the words.

  Miss Taylor hadn’t got around to lying for me, but she’d certainly lied brilliantly for Connie.

  Ever since I’d left for Idlewild on Sunday morning, my wife had been alone. Ala had been physically there, of course, but she’d been locked in her bedroom at the back of the house. Connie could have gone out and come back a dozen times—and nobody would ever have known.

  TWENTY

  Eve and I were sitting together in the pink living room. I’d gone directly to her house and told her about Connie. For a while she just couldn’t believe it. That was another of the ironies. Eve was like everyone else, including me. She was so convinced of Connie’s integrity that it was beyond her powers of comprehension to grasp the fact that Connie, of all people, could have been saying one thing and doing another—forcing Ala to speak the truth while she at the same time had been hiding her own far more incriminating involvement.

  “But all that about Miss Taylor and the puzzle—it wasn’t just for Trant. She told you Miss Taylor had been there long before there was any question of alibis. She’d decided on it from the beginning, hadn’t she?”

  “She must have.”

  “And the bracelet.”

  “I know.”

  She was looking at me, her eyes very solemn. “Do you think she could have been lying about that too? I mean, do you think she was really crazy about Saxby?”

  Did I? Whatever else I was prepared to believe, could I possibly believe that my wife’s pathetic baring of her heart about our marriage that morning had been nothing but a theatrical sham? It was fine. I liked it fine. But whenever it got to be five o’clock I suddenly thought: George is coming home soon…

  “No,” I said. “I can’t believe that. The thing with the bracelet was faked by Saxby.”

  “But even so, he could have used it against her, couldn’t he? Ala had refused to listen about the Duvreuxs. She’d said she was going to marry him anyway. If Connie had gone to Don’s determined to break it up once and for all, if she’d threatened to call the police and expose him about the Duvreuxs, couldn’t he have counter-threatened with the bracelet? Either I marry Ala or I tell your husband you’ve been having an affair with me. It’s awful, I know, that she was still thinking—well, that she had you. But couldn’t it have happened that way? Connie, thinking she was saving not only Ala but her marriage, picking up the gun…?”

  That had occurred to me too because nothing, of course, could have been more in keeping with Connie’s character. Poor Connie, barging into yet another situation determined at all costs to save everybody singlehanded.

  “George,” Eve was saying very quietly, “what are you going to do?”

  Always, however hard we tried to get away from it, we had come back to that.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But if they try to arrest you…”

  “How can they when they have no proof?”

  “Do you really believe that still? They know you have a motive. They know you have no alibi. And you did go there. Maybe they’ll find that out, too. Oh, George, I know how you feel. She’s your wife. You feel guilty because of us. Of course you do. But—but we’ve tried, haven t we? For months we’ve been trying to put her first, trying to do the right thing. There’s got to come a time when we think about us. And if they arrested you now, now when we’re so nearly there…” Suddenly her face was out of control. She threw herself against me. “Oh, George, George darling, if they do try to arrest you, tell. Please, promise me if you have to, you’ll tell.”

  I knew, of course, that she was right. Whatever Connie had or hadn’t done was no longer my responsibility. Whatever muddled feelings might still be goading me—guilt, pity, even the residue of tenderness for my wife—were now in a way betrayals of Eve.

  I put my arms around her, drawing her closer, kissing her.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Oh, George, I know. I do know.”

  “Then there’s something else you know too. You know I’ll never let anything stop me taking you to Tobago. Not Trant, not Connie—not even Ala.”

  “Then—then you promise?”

  “If need be. But first I’m going to call her at Vivien’s. It’s the least I can do.”

  I kissed her again and, getting up from the couch, went to the phone. Just as I was about to lift the receiver, the front door buzzer rang. Eve jumped up.

  “Don’t answer,” I said.

  It buzzed again. We both turned, looking uneasily into the little hall as if the hall itself constituted a threat. Then for the third time the buzzer sounded. This time the finger pressing it didn’t release its pressure, sending a continuous screech echoing through the apartment.

  “You’d better go,” I said. “Just get rid of them—whoever it is.”

  Eve hurried out into the hall. I heard the door open. I heard Eve give a little exclamation. Then, coming ahead of her, walking in as nonchalantly as though he were a cocktail guest, Lieutenant Trant moved into the room.

  “Hello, Mr. Hadley,” he said. “I rather expected to find you here.”

  He was smiling his same old aren’t-we-buddies smile. I knew he was actually standing there, but for a moment he had no reality as if he were merely a figment of my own anxieties. The smile lingered on me for a moment, then he moved it to Eve.

  “I’m sorry about making all that racket, Mrs. Lord, but I was told you were in, and this is quite important. My name, by the way, is Trant. Lieutenant Trant. Do you mind if we all sit down?”

  He waited as he always waited. He made his little gesture. Eve hesitated, glanced at me and then sat down on the couch. I sat down beside her. Then, as always, after he was the only one left standing, Trant lingered a moment, dominating. Then he perched himself on the arm of a chair.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “why people go on thinking of Manhattan as a big, impersonal, faceless no man’s land. To me it’s always seemed much the same as any small town anywhere in the country. Neighbors watch neighbors the way they watch them in Skull Crossing, Montana. And neighbors—mostly female neighbors—make a point of calling the cops whenever they get a chance, just the same as if Mrs. O’Grady’s heifer had broken through their backyard fence again.”

  He paused. “This evening, Mr. Hadley, when I got back to the office after talking to you, there was a message that a
Mrs. Ross had called. I’ve just come from talking to her. As it happens, she lives upstairs in this building. She’d called me because she’d seen your picture in the papers. She wanted me to know, in the strictest confidence as she put it, that for the last four months if not longer you’d been coming here every Thursday evening to see Mrs. Lord.”

  He took out his cigarette case and held it without opening it in his hand.

  “And not only that. As it turned out, Mrs. Ross also saw you here on the actual afternoon of the murder. You may remember her, Mr. Hadley, a large blonde with a white poodle. Apparently you tangled together right outside the building. On Sunday afternoons, it seems that Mrs. Ross makes a habit of walking the white poodle at exactly five minutes to four because there’s a television program she watches at four—which establishes the fact that it was five minutes to four when you came here. As you may remember, Don Saxby was shot at three-thirty. Anyone, even a white-haired little old lady, can walk from Saxby’s apartment here in under twenty minutes.”

  He opened the cigarette case. He took out a cigarette. While I waited for him to tap it against the silver top of the case, I could feel the veins throbbing in my temples. The tapping came. He put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it.

  “I told you, Mr. Hadley, that you had both opportunity and motive, but I didn’t know at the time just how much opportunity and motive you had, did I? I didn’t know that you were seen less than twenty minutes after the crime at a spot only fifteen minutes away. Nor, speaking in terms of motive, did I know that it wasn’t merely a question of your wife and your daughter, it was a question of Mrs. Lord, too. Don Saxby, who could always be depended upon for digging up scandal, must have been very pleased to find out about Mrs. Lord. He had you three ways, didn’t he? If it had cost the irreproachable Mr. Duvreux ten thousand dollars to pay him off, how much was it going to cost you? More money, I’d say, than you were either willing or able to pay. I don’t blame you. Let me say that again, I don’t blame you at all. But it’s too bad, isn’t it, that your wife’s attempt to get you an alibi—which was really noble of her under the circumstances—just didn’t happen to work out?”

  They can’t do anything to you if you’re innocent! All the time that his voice had gone stabbingly on, I’d tried to cling to that shakiest of premises. And yet with every word his case had become more hideously plausible. There were, it seemed, hosts of witnesses, people I’d hardly thought of, people I’d never even seen—Mrs. Ross, the motel owners, the Fostwicks in Toronto—hosts of them, all relentlessly marshaled by Lieutenant Trant to prove that they can indeed do something to you if you’re innocent.

  “Well, Mr. Hadley.” Cigarette smoke was trailing between his face and mine. “What would you say now if I accused you of killing Donald Saxby?”

  All this time Eve had been sitting close to me on the couch, very straight, her hand brushing against my knee. I had been very conscious of her hand. It had been the one thing that was giving me any steadiness at all. Now, as I let the situation flounder on with no power, it seemed, to control it, she rose to her feet. For a moment she stood glaring at Trant, then she turned back to me.

  “Tell him, George,” she said. “You’ve got to. You promised me. Tell him.”

  “Just what do you want him to tell me, Mrs. Lord?” Trant said softly.

  She stood there, looking at me, her face bleak with despair. “I know it’s awful. I know how you feel. But—but it’s got to be done. It’s… No, maybe it hasn’t. Maybe there’s another way, a way which won’t make it so bad for you later on.”

  She had turned toward the phone. For still another long moment she hesitated, then she went to it and dialed a number.

  “Hello. Can I speak to Mrs. Hadley, please?”

  “Eve!” I exclaimed.

  I jumped to my feet. I took a step toward her, but before I reached her she was saying, “Mrs. Hadley? This is Eve Lord. Something’s happened and I think you ought to know. Lieutenant Trant’s just accused George of killing Don Saxby. He’s accused him because he thinks George is the only one in the Hadley family without an alibi. This is my idea, to call you, it isn’t George’s. I just think there might be something you want to say.”

  Her voice was icily calm. Somehow it had managed to paralyze not only me but Lieutenant Trant. We both watched her, keeping perfectly still. Faintly I could hear my wife’s voice at the other end of the phone. Then Eve was holding the receiver out to me.

  “She wants to talk to you.”

  I took the phone. Everything seemed to be a long way off. I heard Connie’s voice, very clipped and brisk.

  “George, is this true?”

  “It’s true.”

  “And it’s just because the alibi with Miss Taylor didn’t work?”

  “More or less.”

  For a moment there was a pause. Then she said, “You haven’t told him about Ala?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And he’s going to arrest you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then, George, George dear, you can’t hold back any more. You know you can’t. You know Ala wouldn’t want you to. Tell him.”

  “About Ala?”

  “It’s too late now. We can’t lie any more—any of us. We’ll have to tell the truth—and face it.”

  “The truth, for example, about Miss Taylor?”

  I waited, feeling an extraordinary, disembodied lightness. “Miss Taylor?” said Connie. “What about Miss Taylor?”

  “That she wasn’t at the house on Sunday at all?”

  “Wasn’t there? But—but, George, of course she was there.”

  “And you did the puzzle together?”

  “Well, no, not that. Not the puzzle. How did you find out?”

  “I just did,” I said.

  “I meant to tell you this morning, but—well, there were quite a lot of other things to talk about, weren’t there? You see, I know how the police are. Right from the beginning I knew we’d need as good an alibi as possible for Ala. It wasn’t just that I knew she’d snuck out, it was the Richmond thing too. I was so scared they’d find that out, and just Miss Taylor and I saying we were there seemed so feeble since Miss Taylor was almost a part of the family. So—so I thought I’d make it look better. I thought if I got Miss Taylor to fill in the puzzle, at least there’d be something tangible. I mean, they couldn’t say we were lying if there was the puzzle with both our handwriting as evidence, could they? That’s what I thought. That’s…” Her voice suddenly cracked. “But, George, all this time you’ve been thinking Miss Taylor wasn’t here at all?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then—then what must you have thought of me? That I’d been doing it for myself? To try to make an alibi for myself? Oh, George... let me talk to the Lieutenant.”

  “But—”

  “Please, George, let me talk to the Lieutenant. I’ll make him see. I’ll tell him everything, but I’ll make him see. Somehow I’ll make him see.”

  Somehow she’d make him see. Through all the conflicting thoughts and emotions, that was what came through to me the strongest. Connie being Connie! Connie once again fighting the dragon singlehanded. I’ll do something. I’ll make them see.

  I handed the phone to Trant. The instant I did so, Eve cried, “I had to. George, you do see, don’t you?”

  “Of course I see,” I said.

  I went to her and put my arm around her waist. We stood watching Trant while Connie “made him see.” He hardly said a word, just an occasional “yes” or “no.” Then with a “No, not now. There’s no need for you at the moment,” he put the receiver back on its stand. He turned to look at me.

  “So all along it’s been Miss Hadley you’ve been protecting.”

  “More or less,” I said.

  The friendly smile came again and for the first time its friendliness seemed totally without ulterior motive.

  “Then I think this is the moment to tell you that in all my experience as a cop I’ve never m
et two people who lied so often and so badly as you and your wife. It’s a relief to know it was in so admirable a cause. It’s a relief too to know that my little comedy paid off. I apologize, Mr. Hadley, but you’ll have to take my word for it that I had my reasons.”

  “Reasons?” I said. “For what?”

  “For accusing you.”

  He paused a moment as if he were musing. Then his eyes moved from mine back to Eve. She was looking at him, her lips parted in astonishment.

  “Then you’ve known all along that George didn’t do it?”

  “Not all along, Mrs. Lord. Until just about an hour ago, I was almost sure he was guilty. But just now when I went on with the accusation here, it was a bit phony, I admit. I was using a little pressure to squeeze out the facts. A cop on a case has to ascertain all the facts, you know. It says so in the detective’s manual, page seventeen, I think.”

  I watched him with no feeling at all, knowing once and for all that I was never going to be able to understand him.

  “You mean you’d found out about Ala for yourself?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Hadley. That was quite a surprise. In this case, I’ve turned out to be the most consistently surprised cop in the history of the New York police force.”

  He stubbed his cigarette in an ash tray.

  “You see, while I was talking to Mrs. Ross upstairs, a phone call came through from headquarters. After that even I could hardly go on believing that you were guilty, because the murder of Donald Saxby has been solved.”

  He went back to the chair and perched himself once more on its arm.

  “Yes,” he said, “nothing fancy, no gimmicks, just a call from headquarters. Of course, I set things up for the call. I can at least give myself credit for that. But I didn’t really get any nearer to solving the case than you, Mr. Hadley. In fact, you got a little nearer than I did. You were the one who made such a fuss about San Francisco.”

  He looked down at his hands as if suddenly the condition of his nails was of vital importance to him.