Pale Betrayer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Marks, at headquarters an hour later, tried to write up the gist of his interview with Mother St. Ambrose. There was nothing to write really, and yet the nun’s words had affected him deeply. He was annoyed as a result of the visit. With himself? He wasn’t sure. He did not like Mather. Was this the reason he had allowed himself to get on the man’s back? He had no evidence against him. Just his eccentricity and the Byron coincidence out of which he’d been trying to build his own allegory. He could see himself trying that on the Inspector. There was something to be said for dumb cops, he decided. Facts were facts, and fancies were for the birds. He went down to the squadroom where the day’s round-up was breaking up. Redmond, standing with Pererro and Herring who had just come in, called out to Marks to join them.

  “I don’t know what we got,” Herring said, “but we got a lot of something.”

  Redmond was trying to take the top from a container of coffee, the tab having broken off in his fingers. Marks suggested he use his pipe reamer.

  “I thought we had a tough precinct,” Pererro said. “I just got me a Harlem education.”

  “Spanish Harlem,” Herring corrected. “That’s special. Most of the docs are Spanish-speaking where we went looking. Some of them are refugees and most of them don’t want to talk, period. Pererro and I figured out that’s because maybe they’re not all the way kosher. You know, maybe they’re not licensed to practice everything? And man, in some of those places you got to practice everything. Captain, did you ever see rickets? We got ’em in these United States in the great city of New York. Kids with legs like this.” He held up two skinny fingers.

  “A humanitarian yet,” Redmond growled. The container lid gave way and he splashed the coffee over his hands and the stack of flyers face-down on the table.

  Marks, moving the flyers out of the way, picked up the top one. The ink was not dry, but it was the printed composite picture of Anne’s and Mather’s suspect, a pudgy face, dark brows …

  “Some of these places don’t have their doc’s address even,” Herring continued, “only a phone number where they can leave a call. And not one out of ten could tell us the kind of car their medic drove. But we got a list of twelve doctors and checked out three of them so far …”

  “Why twelve?” Redmond asked.

  “That’s the number of places where that handkerchief could’ve come from. Oh, man! Twenty-four gross of them were given out last Christmas by the Hispanic Brotherhood.”

  “Twenty-four gross!” Redmond said, “oh my God.”

  “One of the brotherhood imported them from Czechoslovakia and by mistake got ten times what he ordered. They were given out to all the charitable institutions on their list, twenty homes, hospitals and orphanages. But wait, man: only eight out of the twenty send their laundry out. That left us twelve just to worry about. We got samples of their washing compound from every one of them.”

  “Good work,” Redmond murmured.

  Herring grinned. “Old Pererro, the soap sniffer. Just call him Sneezy.”

  “Twelve institutions and twelve different doctors?” Marks said.

  “Yes, sir. We figured they split up the charity so’s one man wouldn’t have to take too much of it.”

  Marks said: “It just seems like a lot of doctors, doesn’t it?”

  “You know—about these foreign medics,” Pererro said, “I heard once they’re the guys who get tapped for patching up criminals—you know, plastic surgery.”

  The others looked at him blankly.

  “I was thinking about the knife,” he explained.

  “If it was a surgical knife,” Redmond reminded him. “It’s not in our possession.”

  Pererro went on just the same: “How about this angle on the doc we’re looking for: say he had a sideline, a hole down here with a coverup where he could do abortions?”

  Herring’s eyes were dancing. He was ready to jump on the new theory, to expand it, but all he got out was: “How about that, man?”

  Redmond broke in: “For the love of God, stop playing the D.A.’s men and just bring in the doctor who parked his car in the lumberyard. What a hell of a combine you two make.”

  The younger men looked chastened, but not enough so. “I mean it,” Redmond said. “I get paid for doing the thinking for this precinct. You two get paid for doing piece work. Now get all that jazz into report form. Get your samples to the lab, and I’ll make the assignments from there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Herring said. Then, glancing at his book: “How about the docs we didn’t get to check out yet?”

  “Mañana,” Redmond said. “And maybe the lab can thin them out for you. Did you think of that?”

  Herring didn’t say anything.

  “If your doctor is on that list you’re going to give us, you could flush him too soon and we might never get him. You’ve done a good day’s work, but you’re just the line men in this team. Remember that.”

  Marks, the “Wanted” flyer in his hand, followed Redmond upstairs. “Did Eric Mather show up to verify this likeness, Captain?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but we decided to run it anyway. We can always run another one if we have to. It’s good press relations—as your boss pointed out.”

  Marks said nothing. So far he had escaped the pressure which was obviously mounting on the men nearer the top.

  Redmond sat down at his desk, got out his pipe and filled it. “You know,” he said, “those two did do a hell of a job today.”

  Marks, his elbows on the desk opposite Redmond’s, nodded. “Twelve doctors, twelve Spanish-speaking doctors. Where did they all come from?”

  Redmond lit his pipe, pulling noisily at it. “Cuba? Herring said some of them were refugees. The Trujillo outfit’s washed up now, isn’t it—wherever they came from? I can’t keep up with all their revolutions. But they’re a rotten bunch to tangle with, I’ll tell you that. We had to break up an anti-Castro rally down here one night. I got a finger damn near chewed off. A woman! Christ, the way she carried on I thought I was going to get rabies.” He thrust his hand across the desk for Marks to look at, the little finger extended. “Eight stitches.”

  “A Spanish-speaking doctor?”

  “Hell, no. I went to Bellevue.” He had to relight his pipe. He paused, the match mid-air, and pointed the pipe at Marks. “That abortion angle Pererro started on? I was thinking of that myself today. There’s some of it goes on down here. Only I couldn’t figure any way to tie it in with Bradley.”

  Something clicked with Marks, but he couldn’t quite catch it.

  Redmond squinted at him through the maze of smoke he was now pumping out of the pipe. He knew he had started something.

  “Something,” Marks said, rapping his forehead with his knuckles. “What is it?”

  Redmond said: “She’s a good-looking dame, Bradley’s widow, if you can judge by the picture in this morning’s Journal.”

  “That’s it!” Marks cried, but almost at once he doubted the significance of his association. “Janet Bradley is a photographer. She has a book about to come out—pictures taken along these streets. When she was taking them, she’d leave her equipment at Anne Russo’s. Bradley himself used to go with her sometimes …”

  “But where does the doctor come in?” Redmond said.

  Marks took his time. It wasn’t going to be easy to explain to Redmond his own reaction to one of the pictures in that book. And that really was all there was to the association. But Redmond was waiting. Marks had to try. He shook out a cigarette and lit it. “The book is called Child of the City. There’s a little boy in most of the pictures, a grubby little kid, Italian or Puerto Rican. But there’s one picture that tore my guts out—a young woman standing on the steps of a tenement building looking down at the youngster. The more I looked at it, the more I thought, this girl’s in trouble. What a picture! You couldn’t pose that—you just had to wait for it to happen.” Marks half-expected Redmond to spout a sarcasm as he felt Fitzgerald would under the circumstances.

>   But the Captain said: “Is the building identifiable in the picture?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to see the picture again. This part could be my imagination, remembering something that wasn’t in it at all, but I seem to think now there was some kind of sign in the window above.”

  “Dr. So and So?”

  Marks said: “That’s what’s running through my mind now.”

  Redmond sat back and smoked thoughtfully. After a moment he said: “So there’s the possibility that Peter Bradley was able to identify one of his assailants—or at least the assailant thought so. Let’s take a look now at what we’ve got and see if we can put together what happened to Bradley in his last hour, shall we?”

  Marks nodded and both men started to speak at once. Redmond said: “You start it off.”

  Marks said: “Bradley left the house at nine fifteen, tailed by this character.” He indicated the flyer. “We’ll call him A. A was probably in a car driven by B who could be our doctor. A dropped off at the corner of Tenth Street to set up things at Anne Russo’s. B tailed Bradley all the way to the lab and drove up behind him just as Bradley reached the entrance. He’d have to do that to make it seem natural, his asking: ‘Are you Dr. Bradley?’ Then he persuaded Bradley that Anne Russo was hurt—or ill.”

  “But the girl had left Bradley’s house with the others,” Redmond said. “Wouldn’t Bradley assume she was at the laboratory?”

  “Actually she hadn’t. Steinberg and the boys had gone downstairs ahead of her. She had to run to catch up with them. And even if she doesn’t remember it, it’s just possible she said within Bradley’s hearing: ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses. I’ll have to go home for them.’”

  “In any case,” Redmond said, “Bradley seems to have got into B’s car without much protest. Go on.”

  “By a quarter to ten, they were outside Anne’s house—but the car seems to have gone on quickly. The old lady looking out her window—dividing her attention between the wrestling match on television and the street, didn’t notice the car, just two men—and heard somebody call, ‘Doctor.’ Whether from inside the vestibule or on the street, we don’t know. There has to be a Mr. C involved now. Maybe he drove the doctor’s car and parked it in the lumberyard while the other two went inside with Bradley. A was already on the scene.”

  “The lumberyard—that’s the stickler,” Redmond said. “Why that elaborate preparation? Why not just park the car on the street for a quicker getaway? Was it a safe place to count the money they’d taken from Bradley?” He shook his head.

  Marks said: “It wasn’t his money they were after. Something bigger. Something that came with the film or in his notes. It has to be.”

  “I agree,” Redmond said. He relit his pipe, long since gone out again. “Dave, suppose they didn’t get what they were looking for? Suppose Bradley had—in effect—doublecrossed them? Suppose they did use the lumberyard as a place to examine what they’d taken. Maybe they needed light, strong light—for film? A lumberyard would have an outlet for power equipment. Say they didn’t get what they were looking for. They then assumed Bradley had caught on …”

  “That means he was carrying something he wasn’t supposed to know about himself,” Marks interjected. “A dummy carrier?”

  “Right. At the time they were examining the film, Bradley was lying unconscious in the apartment hallway. A few minutes later the woman with the dog saw him struggling out among the ashcans. He was out there for anybody to see who looked. And they would have looked. If Bradley wasn’t carrying what they expected, he was their enemy. And in his condition at that moment, a very easy one to put a knife in.”

  “That makes the doctor our hottest prospect, doesn’t it?” Marks said after a moment.

  “Hot and slippery,” Redmond said. “He must have a damned good story ready for us or he wouldn’t have left so wide a trail.”

  “Funny, how we started in one direction and came out another,” Marks said.

  “That photograph needs to be checked all the same,” Redmond said. “We’re a long ways from home.”

  There was no one at the Bradley apartment when Marks called. He knew that Janet had flown to Chicago for the interment there, but he had hoped Louise might be at the apartment. He found her at her own home, Anne Russo with her, as well as three of the wildest children it had ever been his misfortune to meet.

  “They’re always like this after they’ve been with Grandma Steinberg,” Louise shouted over the din. “I just let ’em go till they’re exhausted.”

  Anne, apparently on the theory that she could not lick them, had joined them. They had her tied to a diningroom chair from which she smiled up at Marks while the Steinberg Indians whooped around her.

  “Joan of Arc or Pocahontas?” Marks shouted.

  “Houdini!” Anne cried and broke the strings in a burst of flailing arms and legs.

  The adults retreated to the kitchen, Louise closing the door behind them. Steinberg, the scientist, it was plain to see, hadn’t washed a dish during his wife’s absence.

  “Do you have a key to the Bradley apartment?” Marks asked.

  “I put it in the mailbox,” Louise said. “Why?”

  “There’s something I want to see—Mrs. Bradley’s book.”

  “It isn’t there. I packed Janet’s suitcase for her and stuck it in. There was room.”

  Marks, astounded, said: “Why not the telephone book?”

  Louise looked offended. “I thought she might need something like that, work—some distraction.”

  Marks was beginning to understand that Louise was one of those people who organized other people’s affairs for them and her own not at all. “There’s a picture in it I wanted to see again and to ask her about.”

  “She’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “Mañana,” Marks said.

  Then Anne said: “There’s an exhibit of Janet’s pictures in Lowell Hall. Mostly trick stuff though, you know, non-objective.”

  “Are there pictures from the new book in it?”

  “A few, I think,” Anne said.

  “Where’s Lowell Hall?”

  Louise said: “Annie, why don’t you take him there? He might have trouble getting in at this hour.”

  Louise, the matchmaker, Marks thought, but he was not displeased. “Do you mind?”

  Anne made a futile gesture toward the dish-filled sink.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Louise said. “I’ve got to do something till the demons wear themselves out.” She took them to the hall door. “Come back later for coffee. I’d offer you dinner, but not in this mess.” A very subtle woman, Marks thought, but the least he was going to do was take things at his own pace.

  It was almost six o’clock when they reached the University and they had to get the custodian to open the lecture hall and turn on the lights.

  “Should I tip him?” Marks whispered.

  Anne shook her head. “Dangerous precedent.” She flashed the man a smile and Marks thought it would be a mighty poor man who wouldn’t settle for that.

  They walked solemnly along the walls hung with Janet Bradley’s work: wisping trailing camera effects, light and shadow; then a group of surrealist designs started out of city skyscrapers. “I shouldn’t be enjoying this,” Marks said, “but I am.” He was aware of a group of portrait photographs which they had not yet reached.

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She makes this city beautiful, and it’s not.”

  “But there’s beauty in it if you look hard enough.”

  “In the right places,” Marks said. “I don’t often get to them.”

  The first portrait in a series came as a shock to Marks: it was of Anne Russo. Janet had caught her as she was looking up from her desk at home. Pencil in hand, she looked radiant, as though she had just made a marvelous discovery. Marks looked from the picture to the girl. She was almost his height, her face flushed now, self-conscious. “It doesn’t flatter you, you kn
ow. It’s just you at the right moment.”

  “You should see me at some of my wrong ones,” Anne said, trying to edge him along. “I’d forgotten Janet was there that night. She was working. So was I. She didn’t tell me. Afterwards she said she’d been watching me for an hour. Most of the time I’d been biting my thumb.” Anne motioned toward a picture down the line. “There’s one from the book I think.”

  It was the portrait of the dark, troubled girl on the steps which Marks had remembered. But it was the insert only, an enlargement of her face, showing nothing of the background in which Marks was at the moment most interested.

  “Did Mrs. Bradley talk to you about this picture, where she took it?”

  Anne shook her head. “She doesn’t talk about her pictures ever. If they don’t speak, she said once, then I don’t have anything to say either.”

  In the hallway, having told the custodian that they were through in Lowell Hall, Marks said: “Anne, would you have dinner with me?”

  She nodded vigorously. “I’d love to.”

  A half-hour later they were sitting in the Bretagne, a restaurant Anne said she always went to with her parents when they came into town. They had the menus and a martini each before them.

  Anne said: “I haven’t had much to eat lately. I always seem about to eat. Then something happens and I don’t want to any more.”

  Marks, glimpsing the prices of the entrees, said: “You’d better eat tonight.”

  “I don’t want to forget, you see, and already I’m beginning to. All day today I kept thinking: I don’t want to go on in science. I don’t care enough, not deep down inside.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to live, whatever that means.” She turned the glass round with her fingertips. Marks noticed she had put on nail polish since last he had seen her. “I want to be like that picture Janet took of me!” She bit her lip then, Marks thought charmingly. “I’m very young, aren’t I?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How old are you, David? Do you mind? I shouldn’t want to be called Dave if I were David, I don’t think.”

  “I’m thirty.”