Pale Betrayer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “At his own apartment or the University. He returned by the first flight this morning.”

  Or so he had told her he was doing, Marks thought. “Was he in Chicago—because of you?”

  Janet tried to be as honest as she could. “I think that’s possible, Lieutenant, but I am not sure.”

  Marks got out and opened the door for her, then got her suitcase from the back seat. Louise was waiting at a discreet distance, standing in the vestibule doorway.

  Janet offered Marks her hand. The handshake was brief, its pressure light. She insisted on taking her own suitcase.

  “You have my sympathy,” Marks said.

  She looked at him sharply, startled. Then she turned to meet Louise who was running down the steps, her arms open. If the words, spoken rather late to have reference to her husband, might in any way forewarn her of further shock ahead, Marks was satisfied. That Mather had made the trip to confide, to confess himself to her, the detective could easily believe. But if that were so, he could not believe that Janet Bradley would now conceal it.

  twenty-five

  MATHER CLIMBED THE STAIRS to the fourth floor, avoiding the use of the crowded elevators. He would take his chances now, but no more of them than necessary. He found the study hall crowded, some of his own students at the tables. He nodded at those who noticed him and ignored the whispering that sometimes followed in his wake. He laid a firm hand on Osterman’s shoulder, coming up unnoticed behind him. As the boy looked up, he said: “I want to talk with you. Come.”

  Without protest the boy got up, leaving his open books, and followed him. Mather led the way to the English Department’s common room at the end of the hall. It was deserted as usual. Mather closed the door, and finding a key on the inside, turned it.

  Osterman was at the age when his features changed, month to month. Mather had thought him a good-looking boy, rather virile, when he had had him in his classes. That no doubt accounted for the fury with which he had struck him when the boy had put his hand in his—and after which, except for the night in the Red Lantern, he had determinedly not thought of him at all. Now the boy’s face was soft and sallow, an effete corruption showing at his mouth that sickened Mather. He did not want to know more than his own instinct told him of Osterman’s relationship with the big blond partner to his own conspiracy. He wanted to know but one thing.

  “How do I get in touch with Tom? Where can I reach him?”

  “Tom?” The eyes were insolent.

  Mather kept his hands at his side, but the boy saw the clenching of his fists and his own eyes strayed toward the door. Mather had left the key in it.

  “I have a witness who will swear to your association with him.”

  “Mr. Mather, why do you hate me so much? I’ve never harmed you. I’ve tried with all my might not to embarrass either one of us. I even tried at first to do what you said I should—to find a girl. Remember, after you hit me?” The boy was pouting, whining like a righteous child in its own defense.

  “Or a psychiatrist, I think I said.”

  “Do you know what I did, Mr. Mather? I walked straight across the park, into the building and asked the first girl I met to go out with me that night. And in spite of all the show you made over her in the Red Lantern, she was the most vulgar, horrid, pretentious hag. Besides which, she smelled.”

  “And so you went back to the park for fresh air. And got picked up by Tom.”

  “You make it sound so vulgar.”

  “A pickup, man or woman, is vulgar,” Mather said.

  “Oh, you Puritan! You’re a New England prude, if you don’t mind my saying it, Mr. Mather.”

  “I don’t mind what you say—or to whom you say it, Osterman. I want one small piece of information from you. You took a notice from the bulletin board on Monday. What did you do with it?”

  “I read it to Tom over the telephone. He’s been wanting to get a dog, one he wouldn’t have to pay much money for.”

  Dear God, Mather thought. The boy could not be that simple. “But you took the notice down from the board!”

  “I didn’t want them all to be gone before he could get there.”

  “What did he say to you? And when? How did you know to watch the board?”

  “He asked me to. He said a friend had told him when the litter was old enough he was going to advertise it there. And last week-end when I saw him, he reminded me to watch for it and call him right away.”

  “What does Tom do for a living?” Mather asked. He had to know it all now. For the boy’s sake, not his own.

  “He’s a construction engineer. He was working on the project south of the park. Now he’s gone to Florida. He’s promised to write to me.”

  “Has he taken the puppy with him?” Mather asked, sick to his bones.

  “I didn’t think to ask him. I shouldn’t think so, but I’d have been willing to keep it for him.”

  Mather folded his arms. He was half-sitting on a desk. Someone rattled the door and then went away. “Jeffrey, just when did you meet him?”

  “You want me to tell you that. All right. I met him when I needed him. When you struck me in the face. The next day—he’d seen it happen.”

  “So I’d supposed. He asked you about me?”

  “Not really. He wanted to know more about me … and the red-headed girl. Do you know, she’s had the nerve to keep going back to the Imagists? On her own!”

  Mather realized that if he tried now to tell the boy what he knew of the man with whom he had taken up he would not believe him. “Don’t you have any parents, Jeffrey?”

  “My mother’s in Boston … with a man.”

  “I see. That accounts for your knowledgeableness about New England prudes. Did you ever meet a friend of Tom’s, a man he called Jerry?”

  “No. We don’t mix with other people. Just ourselves. He has another life to lead.”

  How true. “Did you see a police drawing of a man in this morning’s paper, a man wanted for questioning in Professor Bradley’s murder?”

  “I don’t read newspapers. Bradley taught here at Central, didn’t he?”

  “Tom and his other friend and I myself assisted in Bradley’s murder.” The moment he said the words, Mather recognized the irony: his first overt confession was to this sick boy. He was the more vehement when he added: “Unless I’m able to locate Tom today, I shall tell your story as well as my own to the police.”

  The boy smiled a little, his round mouth unable to hold itself firm. He went deadly pale and Mather thought he was going to faint. He caught him by the arms and shook him. “You’ve been used, my boy, in more ways than one. Do you understand?”

  “No! I’ll hear from him. I know I will.”

  “What name did he give you? Tom what?”

  “Jones. But I knew that was a joke.”

  “Where did you call him? That notice about the puppies—where?”

  “I’ll give you the number. I left the message for him.”

  Mather let go of him. Osterman fumbled in his inside pocket and brought out an address book, his hands trembling so much that he could scarcely open the cover, on the back of which the number was written.

  Mather waited, pencil and a match packet open in his hand. The boy held the book where he could see it for himself, a Spring telephone exchange, far downtown.

  “It isn’t true what you said, is it?” Osterman whined. “You made it up to get Tom’s number out of me?”

  Mather just looked at him. He picked up his valise, took it to his desk and, removing the notebook from it, he left the case on the chair under the desk.

  The boy watched him, not moving from where he stood. “I wish I’d never met him!”

  “So do I,” Mather said from the door.

  Again he used the stairs, running down the four flights, passing only a workman with his toolbox on the way. Reaching the main floor he decided against the trafficked corridors and went on to the basement and outdoors by way of the loading entrance.

 
He was on the south side of the building where the traffic was almost entirely commercial. Nonetheless, he went on for several blocks angling east and south into the hatters’ district before he stepped into a public phone booth. He watched for a pause in the flow of buses and trucks, then deposited his dime and dialed.

  After the second ring, a man’s voice shouted above the noise at his end: “Margueritta Import Company,” and when Mather did not respond at once: “Hello?”

  “I must have the wrong number,” Mather said and hung up. He looked up the address of Margueritta Import in the phone book. It was on DePeyster Street. He then searched for the nearest public library. The Ottendorfer branch was within walking distance.

  There, in the midst of newspaper-reading derelicts, he brought his “Confession” up to date, the last words: The Margueritta Import Company, DePeyster Street.

  The librarian was kind enough to give him an envelope and sell him two five-cent stamps. He addressed the envelope to Lieutenant David Marks, marked it urgent, and going out mailed it at the nearest box. Then he took the Lexington Avenue subway downtown.

  twenty-six

  MARKS SEARCHED THE STUDY he had written of Mather the night before. In the margin of his pages was an occasional question mark, indicating a matter which at the time had seemed of dubious importance but which now remained unanswered. Finding the one he was looking for, he asked Redmond across the room, “Where’s Albion, Illinois? What part of the state

  “It’s a Chicago suburb, on the lake.” Clement Rossiter refused at first to talk to him over the phone. “How do I know who you are, sir? Your telling me doesn’t make it so.”

  Marks said: “I’ll hang up. Then ask the operator to put through the call to me, David Marks, at the Houston Street precinct, New York City.”

  To his amazement Rossiter did just that, calling him collect “I’ve been a victim once of an impersonation. I don’t propose to make the same mistake twice.”

  “Eric Mather, a teacher in your employ at one time,” Marks said briskly.

  “I supposed that was why you were calling. I advised him to go to the police.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday,” Rossiter said.

  Piece by piece, Marks got the story from him.

  “Do you mind telling me the offense Mather had committed?”

  “He was never prosecuted, mind you. The charge was withdrawn … but I did not feel I could withhold such information from men I presumed to be F.B.I. agents.”

  “I understand,” Marks said with more patience than he felt. “The offense, sir?”

  “Violating a minor of the same sex.”

  It would be hard to find an offense more susceptible of blackmail, Marks thought. “Do you remember the bogus investigators well enough to give me a description of them, Mr. Rossiter?”

  “Actually, I remember them the better for Mather’s having described them to me yesterday …”

  “The dark, pudgy one,” Marks tried to propel him.

  “And the tall, blond, all-American footballer.”

  “Right,” Marks said, and thanking him, hung up.

  Downstairs he picked up Detective Pierce, the most likely man available, and went directly to the University. Miss Kelly-Nobakoff was not his prime target, but because the Records Office was on the first floor, he got a newspaper from the corner vendor, and stopped off to see if Sally could identify the police composite in the morning paper. In one instance at least she had told him the truth, she had been visited by men she thought to be F.B.I. investigators.

  Sally did not long withhold the story Mather had asked her to take to Lieutenant Marks. “Only I wasn’t supposed to tell it unless something happened to him.”

  Marks assured her she might be saving her idol’s life, telling it now.

  “Jeffrey Osterman. Remember, I told you about him that night at the Red Lantern?”

  Marks remembered. Jeffrey was another of his neat question marks in the margin of the Mather story.

  twenty-seven

  ERIC MATHER LEFT THE subway at Wall Street and climbed aboveground into a wild melee of scurrying people. Lunch hour was almost over. Clerks and brokers’ jobbers, stenographers and I.B.M.’ers rushed in and out of buildings and along the street like figures in accelerated motion pictures. Even conversations were thrown against him in bits and pieces: the familiar “So-ahs” punctuating everything. One phrase he caught and remembered: “You know, Michael the big noiser …”

  Michael the big noiser, Mather thought, whom he would never know beyond that epithet. How often he had thought of following one conversation picked up on the city street or in a bus until its end. He was confused now in his directions. It did not matter for the moment. He had postponed a purchase until reaching “The Street.” Its affluence prospered the kind of store he was looking for. He walked along Broadway until he came to Billings’ Sporting Supplies. He surveyed his own reflection in the plate-glass window. He had never thought of himself as the sporting type. He went inside and asked to see a fishing knife.

  “For cleaning fish?” the attendant asked.

  “For killing them,” he said, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

  “What kind of fish, sir?”

  Mather could feel the sweat starting at the small of his back. He could not think of the word. The clerk played with a tuft of hair in his ear, waiting. Mather did not want to say the word “big.” He had it then. “Game fish,” he said.

  The clerk showed him a knife with an exquisite blade, having carefully removed the shield.

  “Fine,” Mather said, and watched him wrap it.

  On the street again, his purchase in hand, he looked up trying to gain his direction. The towering buildings swayed against the fast-rolling clouds. Rain was about to fall again. At the corner newsstand he asked the way to DePeyster Street. A few short blocks toward the waterfront, but such a difference; glass, marble and steel giving way to brick, wood and plaster. In an alleyway he removed the knife from both paper and shield and plunged the blade through the lining of his pocket to secure it, the leather hilt available to his hand. He threw the wrappings and shield into the first trash basket.

  DePeyster Street was short, ending at the waterfront, where Mather could see the cargo ships lying in their slips, their funnels and derricks obscured by the elevated highway. There were not many people, and all of them, he realized, observing from a metered parking area, were about the final tasks of closing up their businesses, stacking crates, lowering grills, hosing down platforms and loading zones. He approached one of the workmen. “You’re closing up?”

  “We sure are,” the man said without looking up. He was sorting fruit baskets by sizes. “We open up at 2:00 A.M. Twelve hours is enough.”

  “More than enough,” Mather murmured, going on.

  The name Margueritta Import Company was lettered in flaking gold on the black wooden canopy over a loading platform. At his back as he looked across the street were the walls of a vast brick warehouse. That side of the street all the way to the corner was abandoned except for a cat worrying a fish head in the gutter. Traffic on the highway rumbled constantly. Foghorns had started their rhythmic braying in the bay. Mather studied the building for a long time. Someone remained in it. He saw the shadow moving between an office light and the window. Next door was a grill-fronted fish market, hosed and locked up. Further down was a seaman’s home. He saw old men come out of the glass-paneled door. Invariably they moved toward South Street and vanished along the docks. A panhandler ambled past him, reconsidered and turned back to ask him for a quarter. Mather gave him fifty cents and a “drink hearty!” The old lush shambled on. A spitting rain began to fall.

  Mather drew a deep breath and crossed the street. He picked up the smell of rotting fruit as he neared the building, and remembered Jerry’s asking him what kind of work he thought he did. “You sell fruit.” Mather the psychic!

  Baskets and crates were stacked neatly at either side of the pl
atform. Near one of the dusty windows a pale light hung from overhead, throwing its faint rays over a cluttered desk. Mather shielded his eyes and tried to see the room better. An inside door opened on the hallway. He could see no one.

  The outside door opened soundlessly to his hand. The hall beyond the office door led to what looked like a vast storage room. The smell of fruit was pungent here, no longer fetid, the sweet fresh fragrance of orange and lemon. Mather stepped into the office where a battered leather valise sat on the floor a few feet from the door. He heard voices from the storage room, faintly as from a caverned distance, droning on in conversation.

  He moved quickly across to the desk and removed the phone from its receiver. He listened, thinking the voice he heard might be talking on the phone. “All right, my friend.” And after the clicks the buzzing signal. He had caught the last words in a conversation, but both the phrase and the voice he knew to be Jerry’s. To Jerry everyone was “my friend.” He left the receiver off the hook and returned to the door to listen. He could still hear voices.

  Mather knelt down and tried the valise clasp. It was locked, but the bag when he took it by both handles and wrenched them apart burst open. Underwear and socks, a striped shirt … He groped through it wildly, sick, despairing of finding what he sought, the identity of the owner. He listened again for the voices. They seemed to have stopped. His own heartbeat was too loud in his ears for any but the throbbing sound. He heard a laugh then.

  In a zipped side-pocket of the bag he found seaman’s papers and a passport. They belonged to Thomas Gregoris, a naturalized American, born in Greece. Even the passport photo had not disguised his good looks. The tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon-looking all-American was a Greek. Mather thrust the papers and passport into his own breast pocket and closed the bag. It refused to catch; he had to leave it open. At the desk he put the phone back in the cradle.

  “Good luck, my friend!”

  He heard the words ring down the hall and hard upon them the clack of approaching footfalls. Mather concealed himself the only place he could, behind the office door. Through the crack he watched, his hand on the hilt of the knife.