The Pale Betrayer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I’m thirty.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad,” Anne said. “I mean—I was raised a Catholic, you see.”

  “And taught not to go out with married men,” he prompted.

  “It isn’t exactly going out, dinner just, is it? I mean that was presumptuous of me, saying what I did.”

  Marks said: “To me, it’s going out—if there are tablecloths on the table. What do you recommend we have to eat?”

  “Everything is good.”

  “Would you share the Chateaubriand? Rare?”

  She nodded. “You speak French, don’t you—the way you said that?”

  “Waiter’s French anyway,” Marks said.

  “Louise said your father is a judge.”

  “A lawyer.”

  “That’s like Louise. She always pushes people a step ahead of themselves. Everybody’s the greatest.” After a moment she added: “I wish I thought Bob Steinberg was. I don’t.”

  Marks lifted his glass. “You’re comparing him with Peter Bradley. Not many men could stand up to that comparison.”

  “Most of them don’t even try.” She sipped her drink and watched Marks while, by an old habit, he took his pencil and lightly checked off items on the menu.

  He said then: “Clams, onion soup, Chateaubriand and salad. How’s that? And an inexpensive claret—if there is such a thing any more.” He gave the order to the waiter.

  “I wonder if Eric will now,” Anne said.

  Marks was a moment remembering the sequence of her remark.

  “Try to measure up to Peter,” she added.

  “With Janet?”

  Anne nodded. “I know he’s terribly fond of her—at least I’m reasonably sure of it. Only he hates himself so. But now with Peter gone, maybe he won’t feel so inferior.”

  Marks said: “Anne, didn’t I ask you about this once before, the possibility of Mather and Janet Bradley?”

  “No.”

  He had asked Louise, he realized, and considered her a better judge of relationships than Anne Russo.

  “I probably wouldn’t have told you anyway,” Anne said. “I mean, I was guessing and there wasn’t anything between them actually. Just what Eric called his fantasy …” She finished her drink, remembering the martinis she had had with Mather. It seemed years before. “I think Eric is one of the lost people in this world. He tries to hate, I think, because he’s afraid of being hurt in love.”

  What Eric called his fantasy, Marks thought … And here was yet another woman presuming to understand him, making allowances. Why? Marks motioned for another round of drinks. He was no psychologist. But the man Mather was psychopathic. He, too, David Marks, policeman, had been making allowances, subconsciously condemning that catch-all scapegoat, society. Society was the people who composed it, the Eric Mathers along with the rest. Because a sophisticated group of people could accept him, he was not cured automatically! In fact, acceptance might compound his malady—if he had to strive too hard to get it.

  Marks concealed his own uneasiness. He tried to make the question he now asked sound casual: “When did it first occur to you that Eric might be in love with Janet?”

  Anne thought for a moment. “That night … the awful one. Only earlier. I was just going to leave. Eric had already gone. But I wanted to tell Janet how much I’d liked the show at Lowell Hall. She was at the front window looking down. Eric was crossing the street. I didn’t see him at first, but—this all happened in a minute—I saw him turn under the street lamp there and put his fingers to his lips … you know?” Anne repeated the gesture telling it: the fingertips of both hands from her lips toward Marks. “And that wasn’t anything really. I mean I wouldn’t even have thought about—Eric’s like that to everybody—except that Janet, well, there were tears in her eyes when she turned around—and the way she caught my hands and hung onto them for a minute.” Anne looked down at her own hands now. “I’m not very good at a time like that. I run. I’m a funny sort to be an Italian. I’m supposed to be emotional.”

  Marks let her finish, putting her own construction to the incident. But he had to press her then for the picture on the street that night. Mather had initiated the party, maneuvered it, and had been the first to leave. He had described in great detail a man whom he should have seen as no more than a passerby. “Eric crossed the street, turned, and threw the kiss? Didn’t he look up first to see if there was anyone in the window?”

  “No,” Anne said. “That’s what I mean. I wouldn’t have thought about it at all if Janet hadn’t been so—so moved, I guess. David, we’re making a mountain out of it. We shouldn’t. I ploughed in and asked Eric—last night, was it? the night before—I forget. And I didn’t ask really, I just said I thought it would be great, Janet’s needing somebody now. That’s when he said that there was nothing—except his own fantasy.”

  Marks thought about his first meeting with Mather, informing him that Bradley was dead. At the suggestion on Marks’s part that there might have been a relationship between Bradley and Anne Russo, Mather had lent credence to the idea; at least he had tried to contribute to it by saying that he never met his pupils in private, the insinuation being that Bradley did. He was a desperate, cunning man that night, and he had been writhing in his fashion from the moment he left the Bradley house.

  And what actually had happened in Anne’s vestibule: if Redmond was right, the knock on the head should have been enough … Marks felt he now had another part of the story. With just a tinge of regret he realized that this dinner could now go on Investigative Expenses.

  “I’ve started something, haven’t I?” Anne said, watching him. He had crumbled a piece of bread, and was making neat little clusters of the crumbs.

  “You had a drink with Mather yesterday. Where?”

  “A place on Sullivan Street. He was waiting for me when I came out of the lab.”

  “Were you that friendly before?”

  “No. I’d just known him from Peter and Janet’s.”

  “Why do you think he looked you up?”

  Anne did not hesitate. “To compare notes on the man I’d seen in the hallway.”

  “Whom he had seen near the Bradley steps?”

  Anne nodded.

  “Whom neither you nor any of the others coming out of the house saw there?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “Now let’s enjoy our dinner,” Marks said. “You do like clams?”

  “I like food,” Anne said, “and I’d better have some before I drink any more of this martini.”

  nineteen

  IF HE HAD NOT told Janet that he would be in Chicago that night, Mather would have returned to New York at once. The one thing he would not permit himself was fantasy, the dream of Eric Mather, hero, or in disgrace. The future must be no larger than the compass of his atonement, step by step. He would go as far as he could by his own resources and hope that it was far enough to partially redeem him. Jerry and Tom had tracked him back in time; they had tracked him, he was sure now, from an incident in the park. First, they had chosen him as the most likely prospect for their scheme among Peter Bradley’s associates. They must have done a similar job on others until they settled on him as their man. To have used Anne Russo as they finally had when he had no more than mentioned her was proof enough. But how bitterly ironic that in his righteous strength that day, striking a would-be offender, he had exposed the very weakness they were looking for! Evil born of good.

  And he had convinced himself that he was breeding good of evil, content in their conspiracy. Ah, but nothing was that simple: to be honest now he needed to remember his feeling of exultation as, string by string, he had manipulated his unwitting friend. To have had such envious hatred of a man whom he truly loved!

  They had tracked him from the park; and he must now track them. His last contact: the day of Peter’s return. By pre-arrangement with Jerry, he had posted a notice on the third-floor bulletin board in the Gener
al Studies Building: PUPPIES FOR SALE—CALL EL 7-2390 AFTER 9:00 P.M. It told them Peter Bradley would leave the house at that hour, carrying the film. The confirmation: a thrown kiss. He had with consummate skill and sureness carried out his plan. Even now he felt the prickle of pride, and his self-humiliation was the greater for instantly realizing it.

  All afternoon he walked the stark and windy lake front beneath the Albion bluffs, composing in his mind the details of his “Confession.” It must be told ruthlessly, without a word of self-justification. But the sands of the shoreline kept giving way beneath his feet. In the late afternoon he drove into Chicago, parked the car, bought a notebook, and checked in at the Palmer House.

  In a high room, looking down on the elevated tracks below, he noted that the window was sealed, and then began to write. Presently: “… They would have been watching me for some time then. Or they may even have put the boy up to it. I rather think they got to him afterwards. This I propose to find out if I am given the opportunity. They had liaison within the University itself. The boy’s name was Osterman. He dropped out of my classes at the end of the semester, but he used to turn up now and then in a group that called themselves the Imagists …”

  It was after nine when Janet called him. He had long since told himself he had no right to expect that she would call. But all evening long he had been writing with an almost superstitious haste against the moment when the phone might ring. It was as though time were the measure of truth. The notebook pages were scarred with his deletions, for over and over again he had sought to justify himself and scratched out the words. A lifetime of such reflex could not be stilled at a sitting, especially by one who taking pen in hand had always fancied himself a potential Proust.

  His voice showed the strain when he answered the phone.

  “Are you all right, Eric?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “I’m fine,” Janet said. “It’s over now … the ceremony. Just ashes. We put them beneath an oak tree in the place where all the Bradleys are … near his son.”

  He had known of course that there had been a child, but never before had either Janet or Peter spoken of him to him.

  “Now there’s the other,” Janet went on, “why he died. It doesn’t seem important when a man’s reduced to a little box of ashes.”

  “Janet, don’t.”

  But she went on: “I kept thinking all day of the places I hadn’t gone with him because I wasn’t always sure he wanted me. It seemed so indecent—so grotesque to have him all—like a trinket at my wrist.”

  “For the love of God, Janet …”

  “Eric, there has to be some deeper meaning to a man. What did his death mean to the person who killed him?”

  “I too want to find that out,” Mather said quietly.

  “Then tell me quickly. I can bear it.”

  Something in the way she said the words made him say: “Peter was pure, Janet. There was no corruption in him.”

  “I’m much aware of that. Eric, I can take a cab and come downtown—just for an hour. I want to leave this house for a while.”

  He looked at the key lying on the table beside the phone. “Room 723,” he said.

  twenty

  BY THE TIME THEY finished dinner, Marks knew several things about Anne Russo which he had not known: that she had a brother, an archeologist now digging with the British in Egypt—an Egyptologist was in no way to be confused with a United Arab Republican—and that her father and mother had a farm in northern Connecticut to which they had retired when her father left the newspaper; he still wrote editorials when he got angry enough. But on the whole, the evening had not gone as Marks would have liked. His was too grim a business to mix well with pleasure.

  “When all this is over …” he said when they reached the street, and then cut the sentence off: it sounded like a brush-off. “Anne, if you’re not in a hurry I’d like your help in an experiment. It won’t take long.”

  In the car he said: “We’re going to the Bradley house.”

  “Not housebreaking?”

  “No. It’s the outside I’m concerned with now.”

  Anne sat silently. Traffic was light. A cold wind had come up and the side window was open. Marks offered to close it. “No. It’s real,” she said, “the wind. I was forgetting again.”

  “So was I,” Marks said, “which is much worse.” Her ungloved hand lay on the seat between them. Marks laid his upon it and Anne turned hers, palm to palm, and held it. They were both remembering when this had happened before, her holding hard to his hand: when she had had to identify Peter Bradley.

  A few cars were parked along the street in front of the Bradley house. Traffic was very sparse. A light burned in the second-floor apartment, but low and deep within the room. It was to be supposed that it was left burning much of the time. All the lights were on in the first-floor apartment.

  “I don’t suppose you noticed that night if there were lights on there?” Marks said, indicating the first-floor windows beneath which they were standing.

  “No,” Anne said. “I was trying to catch up. I could hear the others down the street, but I couldn’t see them. It’s a dark street, isn’t it?”

  He looked up at the street lamp a few feet from the Bradley steps, a sharp light which nonetheless gave off very little illumination. They waited at the bottom of the steps for a man to pass. He murmured “good evening,” and they answered. He turned in a few doors down the street.

  Marks took off his hat and said: “Do you mind putting this on for a minute?”

  “No,” Anne whispered. She knew now what he was about.

  He put the hat at an angle he wanted, and brushing her hair back with his hand, he saw her lips tremble. “Now just stand where you are—at the bottom step.” He tilted her chin so that she would be looking up. “No one would believe that what I’m doing just now is in the line of duty.”

  Anne laughed nervously.

  “Head up,” he said, “as though you were looking at the door.” He went up the steps. The vestibule doors were half-glass, smoked-glass with etched floral patterns around the frame through which the light from within was multi-colored, prismatic. Marks went into the vestibule and stood there a moment, letting the door close behind him. There was mail again in the Bradley box. He closed his eyes to make sure the afterglow from his having looked into the street lamp had faded. Then he opened the door. For a second or two he could not see anything, then Anne, but only as a figure until he started down the steps, walking very slowly. Even then he had to shade his eyes with his hand in order to see her well: the street light was blinding to anyone coming down the steps. Not until he was alongside her could he really see her features.

  He posted Anne in several places, then on the sidewalk in front of the building while he observed her from the steps. He could not see her clearly from any of them. “And I have twenty-twenty vision,” he said under his breath.

  Across the street they stood for a moment and looked up at the Bradley windows. The floor lamp burned over an empty chair near the study door. The blinds had not been drawn, everyone having gone away in daylight. Marks put the fingers of both hands to his lips and then tossed them toward the house. “Like this?”

  “Yes,” Anne said, scarcely audible.

  They walked to the car in silence.

  “What does it mean, David?” Anne asked, in the car again.

  “I don’t know. But he could not possibly have described the man much better than you did from a chance encounter. There’s something rotten in his story. But till we find out what it is, I’d ask you not to say anything.”

  “Of course,” Anne said. “But why would Eric have described him at all?”

  Marks shook his head. “He’s an enigma wrapped in a dilemma. But it’s my job now to find him and take off the wrappings.”

  “I don’t think I’d like to be a detective,” Anne said presently.

  Marks, pursuing his own thoughts of Mather, said: “‘For each man ki
lls the thing he loves …’” He pulled himself up. “God Almighty, they’ve got me doing it now too. And that whole spiel is rubbish, rhymed, lisping, self-pitying rubbish.”

  “I don’t believe Eric could kill anyone,” Anne said.

  “Don’t bet your life on it,” Marks said. “Nobody could tell you better than Eric Mather the ways there are of killing.”

  “You hate him, don’t you?” Anne said, a sort of hurt surprise in her voice. “You really hate him. Why?”

  “Because I have to. That’s what it’s like being a cop. You hate men for the rotten things they do and you can’t afford the luxury of sorting out the sinners from their sins. In the last analysis, it’s them or you.”

  “Which makes it terribly simple, doesn’t it?” And after a moment when he said nothing: “I never knew a policeman before.”

  “And you often wondered why men joined the force,” Marks said, hurting himself further on her behalf.

  “No. I left that question to my father. He asked it often, being an Italian.”

  “What has that to do with it?”

  “There being so many Italian gangsters.”

  “I would suppose,” Marks said, “he sees very little difference.”

  “I’ve heard him wonder if they weren’t both stems from the same root,” Anne said. “But in the end, he feels, it depends on the man himself.”

  “It should,” Marks said, “but it doesn’t. A cop is a cop.”

  After seeing Anne inside her apartment door, Marks returned to the station house and put a round-the-clock stake-out on Mather’s apartment. He was to be contacted no matter what hour Mather showed.

  Marks went upstairs to find that not only was Redmond still in his office, but with him were Jim Anderson and another federal investigator named Tom Connolly. Connolly, Redmond explained, was an expert on Cuban nationals presently enjoying refuge in the United States.

  Redmond and his men had narrowed the doctors to one prime suspect, a Dr. Rodrique Corrales, the house physician of an orphanage uptown, one of the institutions from which the handkerchief might have come. He also had an office in Harlem and an interest in a “clinic” on East Eleventh Street. “You were right,” Redmond said, and then explained to the federal men, “Lieutenant Marks saw a photograph Mrs. Bradley had taken outside the clinic. That’s what helped us narrow it down to Corrales.” He turned back to Marks. “He drives a black ’59 Chevrolet sedan. We have the license number.”