The Pale Betrayer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Eric John Mather was teaching in his first university post. He had come to Central three years before after taking his doctorate here. He had been working toward the degree while teaching at St. Monica’s College, just outside New York City. Before that he had taught at Albion Preparatory School for Boys in Albion, Illinois. Marks studied the record which by sheer weight seemed sparse compared to Steinberg’s. He had received high recommendation from the headmaster of the boys’ school and from the president of St. Monica’s. The letters, part of the file, revealed more of the senders than the subject, the detective thought: there was in the nun’s words a sort of weary resignation at losing good teachers to better-paying posts. The headmaster of Albion closed a letter of rather heady praise with a single-sentence paragraph that struck Marks not in what it said, but in its terseness, its isolation from the rest of the letter: “We very much regretted Mr. Mather’s leaving us for further study abroad.”

  Marks referred back to Mather’s record: the curious thing about the stint at Albion was that he had taught there for a year and a half; not one year, not two: he had left after the first term of his second year. It was to be supposed the headmaster would have had some difficulty replacing a man he had so effusively praised, midyear.

  Marks glanced through Steinberg’s folio. It was the record of a solid citizen, building all the way, a record religiously kept up-to-date, documenting his research projects, papers read before learned bodies, experiments published. Compared to this, Mather’s dossier was thin and fragmentary, a circumstance not entirely attributable to the differences between art and science.

  Marks put both folders back in the envelope and carried it out of the room with him. He decided to return the files to Sally in person. He wanted to see her in her natural habitat. The coincidence of meeting her again outside the Red Lantern was simply too strong to ignore. The receptionist got up and tugged her dress down over that other of a stenographer’s distress areas, and offered to guide him to the Records Office. Regretfully, he declined. It was on the first floor, on his way out. He gave her Anne’s record to return for him.

  The Records Office was as comfortably furnished as a police van, and about as cheerful. At the railing, surveying a wall of filing cabinets, Marks waited for the one woman in sight to finish a basketful of filing. She seemed to be adding to certain folders such supplements as he had seen in Steinberg’s record. He remembered Sally’s saying that Miss Katz had given her the file so that when the woman finally came to him, Marks said: “Miss Katz?”

  The dreary, sun-starved creature sighed, “Miss Katz is out sick today. Can I help you?”

  “Did she go home ill?” Marks asked.

  “She did not come in at all. What is it you wish, sir?”

  “I’d like to see Miss Nobakoff then,” Marks said, although it was plain that she was not to be seen anywhere in that room at the moment.

  “You must have the wrong department,” the woman said.

  “The girl with red hair—a braid around her head?”

  “That’s Miss Kelly. She’s out for coffee.”

  “Thank you,” Marks said. “These files were signed out to me about a half hour ago.”

  The woman fumbled through a box on the desk and came up with the card. “David Marks?”

  “That’s right.”

  She tore up the card without checking the contents of the envelope and then looked up to see Marks staring at her. “Yes?”

  Marks said: “Do you know where Miss Kelly goes for coffee?”

  “If it was me it would be the place across from the main entrance.”

  Marks caught up with Sally Nobakoff, born Kelly, as she was coming out of the restaurant. He took her by the arm and led her toward the park. “Now look, little lady,” he said, reminding himself of Inspector Fitzgerald, “you have told me at least two lies. It’s a serious matter to give a wrong name to the police.”

  “That’s the name I use when I’m with the boys,” she said with a graceless attempt at innocence.

  “And why tell me that Miss Katz sent you up with the records? She’s not even in the office today.”

  “She almost always is.”

  “That’s beside the point. Why did you tell me she had given them to you?”

  Sally shrugged.

  “Shall I take you in to the station house? It’s a much better place to talk.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then spit out the truth for a change.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I’d looked at them. I’m not supposed to, but I stopped in the washroom on the way upstairs.”

  “Why did you want to look at them?”

  “Just Mr. Mather’s. I think he’s wonderful. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Marks didn’t buy it. The devil of it was there simply wasn’t anything in the record of manifest interest to anyone. “Sally, have you shown Mr. Mather’s record to anyone else?”

  “Oh, no sir. Not to anyone unauthorized. That’s the truth.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the F.B.I. investigators.”

  “I see,” Marks said, and indeed it did put things in a different light. “When was that?”

  “A couple of months ago maybe, and then with you asking me questions last night, well you can’t blame a person’s curiosity.” Sally was beginning to sound righteous.

  Marks cut her off. The truth, he realized, had turned out to be remarkably simple—as was often the case with truth when you finally got to it. “You’d better get back to your desk or you’ll have somebody else’s curiosity to answer to.”

  “Miss Fritchie? Isn’t she the worst?”

  Miss Fritchie and Miss Katz, Marks thought, wondering what they did at night at the hour Miss Kelly turned into Miss Nobakoff.

  He returned to headquarters to find Anne Russo with Redmond and Inspector Fitzgerald, trying to select among the police artist’s sketches the one most resembling their gum-chewing suspect.

  Anne made her selection reluctantly. “They’re all a little like him. Mr. Mather would know better, I should think.”

  “Hasn’t he been here yet?” Marks asked. It was ten thirty.

  “A late riser,” Fitzgerald growled. “Or maybe you didn’t impress upon him that it was important.”

  “I’ll impress it upon him now,” Marks said, the anger springing up in him. His immediate thought was to have Mather picked up at the University.

  But Anne said: “He’ll be at the funeral, Lieutenant Marks—St. John’s Church at eleven.”

  Fifteen minutes later Marks was at the church. Mather was not among either the mourners or the curious: the detective watched the arrivals. Then to be sure when the service was half-over, he checked the side-chapels, every area. Finally he slipped into the pew next to Louise Steinberg. She had not seen Mather since the previous morning when he had broken down at the Bradley house.

  “What do you mean, broke down?” Marks whispered.

  “He started to sob and ran out of the house,” Louise said.

  Marks, leaving the church, thought about the words “ran out.” He contacted the chairman of Mather’s department at the University, who, after a noisy search of the papers on his desk, read Marks the telegram he had received from Mather that morning:

  A MATTER OF URGENCY MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO TAKE TODAY’S CLASSES. SHALL TRY TO RETURN BY TOMORROW AFTERNOON.

  Marks did not like to think what Fitzgerald would say to this development. First, the vanishing doctor. Now this. A matter of urgency: it was Mather’s language all right, but he would use it if he were only going to the corner drugstore for aspirin. He had two men check out Mather’s home, meanwhile putting through an inquiry to the F.B.I. following Sally’s information. Not that he would be given access to anything in their records unless it proved pertinent to the present case, but at least it was covered. He decided then to do a brief search himself into Mather’s background.

  He was taken into the visitors’ parlor of St. Monica’s Co
llege by the portress, a round little nun, who hoped he would be comfortable there until Mother St. Ambrose, the college president, could see him. Marks assured her that he would be, although he doubted it. The room was beautifully furnished, one of the Louis’s, he thought. It was not a period he liked. His mother would go into ecstasies—brocade and gilt, chairs a man wouldn’t dare stretch his legs from. It had always seemed appropriate to him that the kings of that day were rather better remembered for what they did in bed than anywhere else.

  But outside the tall open windows was what seemed to him the whole of spring: green grass, iris beds, lilac bushes weighted with bloom, and trees not yet in full foliage so that through their veil of brownish green the branches seemed to grope the sky. He turned at the sound of the nun’s coming. He was short on experience with members of a religious community, but he quickly discovered that Mother St. Ambrose was long on knowledge of the world beyond her convent. A volatile, quick-smiling woman, she put him at ease from the moment they shook hands.

  Marks explained that he had come to inquire about Eric Mather. Then he said: “While I am a detective, I don’t think you’d call what I’m after routine police information. He may not be implicated at all in my investigation …”

  The nun watched him with a frank, patient curiosity, a look almost of sympathy while he made his inquiry seem more ominous by trying to minimize it. “I’m just trying to dig the man!” he said finally.

  “Colloquial and succinct. I understand,” the nun said, smiling. She sat a moment in thought. “I will say this for Mr. Mather from the outset: he helped us bring St. Monica’s into the second half of the twentieth century. There are some who would call that a dubious blessing, but I have always felt it sinful to dawdle in the past. Education, after all, is a two-way stretch.” Marks heard the sharp intake of breath. The suppressed laughter as she realized the origin of her illustration made her eyes merry. “Yes, indeed,” she murmured, and Marks enjoyed that rare human experience, entering a world which seemed alien and forbidding and finding there all the comforts of home.

  “His manners and decorum with the girls were admirable,” she went on, “and our girls can be a provoking lot, especially with a handsome teacher of the opposite sex. He was not a religious man, but one got the feeling sometimes that he wished he were. I don’t suppose this is what you want to know about him at all.”

  “It is,” Marks said. “Actually it is.” Nothing in his own experience of Mather remotely contributed to such a picture. And yet he knew there had to be something in him to attract so sensible a person as Louise and the perceptive woman he imagined Janet Bradley to be.

  “He had been abroad for a year when he came to us, studying in London.”

  “For a year?” Marks questioned.

  “I’m quite sure, but we can check our records if you like.” She waited for him to say the word.

  “I’d understood it was a shorter period of time.”

  The nun got to her feet. “Well, let’s clear that up. Shall we?”

  Marks regretted having precipitated their coming to grips with facts so soon: it was like having Fitzgerald prod him in the back. “I hate to leave this room,” Marks said, pausing at the window. Just outside, the lilac was in bloom, the scent of it wafting in with every faint stirring of the wind.

  “I’m much too fond of it myself,” the nun said at the door.

  Marks followed her out and past the chapel entrance, an arched door delicately carved, the pattern dominated by the fleur-de-lis. The long hallway through which they walked echoed with Marks’s footfalls and the faint swish of the nun’s light-footed tread. Her long prayer beads were noisier. The smell of floor wax was pungent. Some of the classroom doors were open and as they passed, Marks heard fragments of lectures, a burst of feminine laughter. Mother St. Ambrose caught him glancing sidewise into the rooms.

  “So many girls,” he said, smiling.

  She raised her eyes to the heavens.

  In her office, Marks sitting at the side of her huge, cluttered desk as they waited for her secretary to bring the file, the nun said: “Is the trouble serious—which you’re investigating? I suppose I shouldn’t ask that.”

  “Peter Bradley, the physicist who was murdered the day before yesterday, was a friend of Mr. Mather’s. Mather was one of the people with him less than an hour before his death.”

  “I see.” The nun did not look at him, staring at the glass paperweight on her desk. Something, Marks felt sure, had occurred to her, the relevance of which she was now questioning in her own mind. She turned the weight around absently, stirring the snow scene inside it. The sunlight caught the glint of gold in the ring she wore on her wedding-ring finger, a small gold cross on a simple band.

  “A tragic affair,” she said then, looking up. “One wonders, I suppose stupidly, at the possible international implications—the exchange of film and all.”

  “Dr. Bradley was not working in what they call a classified area,” Marks said.

  “But he was a high-energy physicist?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s so easy to classify work,” the nun said, “it tempts us to classify the people as well.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Marks said.

  “I simply meant that a man like Bradley must have had an open, inquiring mind—to have been engaged in the pursuit of knowledge for no other reason than just to know. It’s the pedants, the utilitarians, the classifiers among us who come along and package the scholars in with their work. I’ve never known a true scholar who didn’t have a lively curiosity about many things. Their impatience, however, with people less precisely informed than themselves, hides this from the, shall I say, shallow observer.” She smiled. “A gratuitous lecture. The girls call where you’re sitting ‘the stock.’”

  Marks said: “Would you call Eric Mather a scholar?”

  “No. Not quite. I’m afraid that despite his aspirations, I should have to call Mr. Mather a dilettante. But mind you, he’s a good teacher … for undergraduates.”

  “Yes. I’ve been informed of that everywhere,” Marks said.

  “Well, shall we look at the record?” The file had been laid before her while she was talking.

  “Has anyone else ever come to you for information about him?”

  “Central University,” the nun said.

  “I mean an investigative body—the F.B.I. for example.”

  “No. You are the only one.”

  She opened the folder and glanced at the letter of application Mather himself had typed eight years before. “I thought so,” she said. “He had taught at Albion Preparatory School for one year, and then studied abroad for a year before coming to us.”

  “Do you have a letter of recommendation from Albion?”

  She drew it from among the several papers in the folder and gave it to him. It was virtually the same letter as he had read at Central University. It made no reference to his tenure at the school. Marks wondered if he was not making a mountain out of a molehill. But why the variation in the records of the two teaching institutions? Was the University likely to have checked into his study abroad where St. Monica’s was not? Probably, if he had wanted to use that credit toward his graduate work. The question still remained, why had he left Albion midyear?

  “I’m very grateful to you, Mother St. Ambrose,” he said, returning the letter. “There’s something I want to admit to you and I’d like your comment on it—if you don’t mind. I’ve talked with Professor Mather a couple of times now, I’ve talked with some of his students, and the picture I had of him was considerably different than the one you’ve given, except for the dilettante part and him being a good teacher. Personally, I find him glib and wily, like quicksilver. I get the feeling that he’s a master of improvisation, and that he’s staying just a leap ahead of me and enjoying it—in spite of the fact that he’s a very frightened man.”

  The nun raised her eyebrows. “Frightened of what?”

  “That’s what I�
��m trying to find out,” Marks said. “It may or may not have anything to do with Bradley’s death. If it doesn’t, it is none of my business. But I’ve got to find out.”

  “When he first came to us,” the nun said thoughtfully, “I remember having the impression that he was—I so dislike to use the word—disturbed. He was like a novice to the priesthood in that terrible period of not being sure of one’s vocation. I’m trying to remember now just what it was about him—self-doubt? fear of unworthiness? the attempt then to lose oneself in God and work. These are unrealistic terms I suppose to a skeptical person. I wonder if you understand what I’m getting at?”

  “I believe in belief,” Marks said.

  “There!” the nun cried. “You are exactly like Mr. Mather. He might have said that.”

  Marks assumed it to be a compliment, but he would not have said it described Mather at all.

  “He spent a great deal of time with Father Dunne who was our chaplain at the time and who also taught metaphysics. Mr. Mather audited some of his classes. He seemed always to be searching. For what? Reality?”

  “In metaphysics?” Marks said skeptically.

  “Then—in physics?” the nun countered. Marks did not say anything. “Father died last year, at the age of forty-two. He was a great loss, and I think he had been very helpful to Mr. Mather who left us a much more confident man than he had come to us.”

  “Obviously he needed help,” Marks said.

  The nun threw up her hands. “The words we bash into images! Disturbed, needing help. Which of us does not, sir, in order to know ourselves, to live?”

  “And you think that was what Mather was trying to do? To know himself? To live?”

  She was slower to answer this time. “Yes. I think that was so.”

  Marks leaned forward. “Forgive me, but isn’t it possible that he was only trying to make that impression on you—and the rest of the college—to create an image of himself as the ascetic scholar, happiest at the feet of a priest?”