The Pale Betrayer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “And the doctor himself?” Marks said.

  “Not yet.” Redmond heaved a heavy sigh. “We can’t pick him up and work him over like an ordinary suspect. Corrales, it turns out, is a big macher in the Cuban liberation movement.”

  “But an American citizen.” Anderson went on reproachfully: “I wouldn’t say you can’t pick him up, Captain. But it would be wise to have the goods on him first. He’s a man of some importance, and his friends are politically most useful to our interests.”

  “But if he’s a murderer?” Marks said.

  “If he murdered Bradley, he must of course be prosecuted,” Anderson said, “I am only suggesting it will be difficult on the basis of such evidence as you have to date.”

  To Marks his words had suggested something else: he felt that Anderson had made a distinction when he said: “If he murdered Bradley …” It caused the Lieutenant to wonder whether other murders were permitted the doctor.

  “Which is not to say you are on the wrong track,” Anderson added, opening the briefcase he hoisted up on Redmond’s desk. He took out what looked to be a news photograph of a crowd of demonstrators. “Could we have the magnifying glass again, Captain?”

  Under the glass, he pointed to a good-looking young man, distinguished by a very flashy smile.

  “Dr. Corrales?” Marks asked.

  “That’s the man,” Anderson said.

  Marks looked at the picture again. “Hey!”

  “Very good! You’re an observant man, Marks.”

  Next to Corrales was a face which bore striking resemblance to the portrait that had been drawn from Eric Mather’s description.

  “What was the occasion?” Marks asked of the crowd picture.

  “The arrival of Castro’s first ambassador to the United Nations. It was taken in the U.N. Plaza.”

  “Was Corrales for or against Castro then?”

  “Against, and presumably he still is.” He glanced at Connolly who was unwrapping a cigar. “We shall be anxious to evaluate anything you pick up on him. I suppose much will depend on who this gentleman turns out to be.” He indicated the dark-browed suspect in Bradley’s killing.

  “You have nothing on him?”

  “You haven’t found out his name for us yet,” Anderson said in his bland way which was every bit as biting as Fitzgerald’s sarcasm. “However, Mr. Connolly assures me that out of—how many people, Tom, in this picture?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “Out of thirty-seven people here on whom we have fairly complete information this man is not among them.”

  “And I’d like to add,” Connolly said, “I don’t think he is connected with Cuban affairs.”

  “Eric Mather said he reminded him of one of the Russian diplomats,” Marks said.

  “Interesting,” Anderson murmured, turning the photo around for another look. “This Eric Mather—he’s your specialty, isn’t he, Marks?”

  “I’ve been out of touch with him for twenty-four hours. I just put a stake-out on his home.”

  “And you expect him to return there?”

  Marks met Anderson’s eyes straight on. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  Anderson nodded and proceeded to put the crowd photo back in his briefcase. Marks caught sight within the case of the box in which Bradley had brought the film into the country. Anderson surprised him staring at it. The F.B.I. man laughed. “I didn’t steal it, Marks. Captain Redmond will explain it to you.” He closed the bag and held out his hand first to Redmond. “I’m sorry we’ve had no more to contribute to your investigation. But you seem to be doing remarkably well on your own.” To Marks he said simply: “Good luck.”

  It crossed Marks’s mind then that Mather might just possibly be in federal custody already.

  “I don’t get it,” Marks said when he and Redmond were alone. “Are they asking us to lay off this Dr. Corrales?”

  Redmond knocked out his pipe in the empty wastebasket. “I see two possibilities, Dave. They’re playing it cool till they find out what it’s all about—Bradley probably did bring something into the country—on microfilm by as simple a means as a false-bottomed box.” He drew four lines on a scratch pad. “The bottom of the box, the microfilm, the false bottom, the legitimate film strips. As I said, either they don’t know yet and want to run even with us, or they already know more than we do and hope that our due process won’t break open their international cover system. Connolly, by the way, is C.I.A.”

  “So where does that leave us, Captain?”

  “Full speed ahead in the morning. Phone in before you come down, Dave. If Corrales is available uptown, we’ll pick you up on the way.”

  twenty-one

  OPENING THE DOOR TO his room ten minutes after Janet called, he left it open, and every time the elevator stopped he looked out to see if it were she, and every time when she did not come he felt reprieved. The urge kept building in him to leave the notebook on the bed—the door open—and himself to flee. He could see her in this room, sitting with the notebook beneath the reproduction of autumn colors in Brown County—trying perhaps to decipher the words he had scratched out. The fact remained that he had not killed Peter. For all the crossing out that he had done, the unexpected truth pared down to in his scrutiny of self was that the man he killed was Eric Mather … who now was simply taking a long time dying. Agamemnon died tonight: how aptly he had spoken in that grandiloquent cry of self-recrimination!

  Janet when she came took him by surprise. Deeply sunk in his own thought, he had not heard the elevator. She stood in the doorway, her coat open, purse and gloves in hand, like a young girl who had been running. He leapt to his feet and crossed the room. Then both of them just stood facing each other as though a phantom wall rose up between them. He opened his arms, a gesture of helplessness, but Janet crashed into them. He held her close then, freeing one hand just long enough to close the door behind her. He brushed her forehead with his lips. She smelled of fresh air, of cleanness.

  “I am alive,” she said over and over again, “and I want to live.”

  Finally she pushed gently away from him and studied his face—as he did hers. Her eyes were deeply circled, the more blue for the darkness under them.

  “You too have suffered,” she said, touching her fingertips to his cheek. “I hope Peter didn’t.” She looked away, saying it. “He could never bear pain. Sometimes I’ve thought you like it.”

  “It has served me—in the absence of other things.” He turned and made a vague motion toward the corner chair. “Would you like a drink?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t eaten,” he said. “Not that I care.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed. “Why are you here, Eric?”

  He shook his head and smiled a little.

  “Why am I here—in this room?” she said then. “The family has gone to bed—except John. He’s gone to see a patient. He dropped me off here.”

  “No questions?”

  “None of the Bradleys ever ask that kind of question,” Janet said.

  “Pride?”

  “Of a certain kind, I suppose.”

  He sat on the floor at her feet, his elbow on the bed, his hand where she could touch it if she wished. “I should always be asking questions of you, Janet, wanting you to tell me more, and again more.”

  She smiled, a little color creeping into her cheeks. “I needed that kind of love,” she said quietly.

  “I worship you, Janet. I haven’t the worth or the right, but it is so nonetheless, and I’m too weak not to say it to you now.”

  “Do not worship me, Eric. I worshipped Peter … and it wasn’t a satisfactory substitute for love.” She leaned back and spread her hand on the bed. “I didn’t want to hurt him, so I fought—myself—in every way I knew. I asked him not to leave me—the night he came home from Athens. But I knew in my heart it was false. I wanted him to go … and you to stay. If you had come back, Eric …” She looked down at him, through him, seeing the supposed lost
moment, and then beyond it. “And worst of all, I’m not at all sure now he didn’t know.”

  “No wonder he went so willingly then, God damn him!” Mather cried, embracing the insight she suggested, and with it bursting the bonds of guilt in which he had tried to bind himself.

  “Eric, Eric.” She tried to reach him, but he drew back from the touch of her hand.

  “Didn’t he laugh in your face?”

  “He would have been too kind for that—too civilized.”

  “But he went all the same, didn’t he? He had nothing to fear from his friend Eric—Eric the cripple!”

  Her sudden fury matched his own. She struck him hard across his face. The sound of it seemed to linger in the after-silence. She said: “I have never allowed anyone to say that of you in my presence, and you will not say it either.”

  His anger fled and he knew he had again sought justification where actually there was none. One’s guilt was one’s own: nothing qualified it. “Oh, Janet, dearest woman. If only faith could make man whole.” He leaned his head on the bed beside her. She stroked it gently, her hand cool where it lingered on his forehead, his cheek. It smelt faintly of cologne.

  “We aren’t any of us ever whole, Eric. It’s only in love that we come close to wholeness—and even that takes two to make one whole.”

  “I don’t think I have ever loved before,” he said.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No. Not at the moment.”

  “Then you won’t ever be afraid again.”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “I wish you never needed to know.”

  “I don’t. I’ve never been one who had to start things from the beginning. I think photography has taught me that the ‘now’ carries enough of the past to answer all we need to know.” She rested her fingers at his temple. He seemed to feel her pulse in them. It was his own, beating against her touch.

  They did not speak for a time. Then she said: “Will you go back tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we go together?”

  “No. I think not. I must go alone on the first flight.”

  “Will you come to me—or shall I come to you?”

  “I’ll come … as soon as I can.”

  “Eric?”

  He raised his head and looked at her.

  “You want to—don’t you?”

  “With all the soul that’s in me.”

  She smiled. “Don’t move now. Not till I’ve gone.” And leaning down, her hand beneath his chin, she kissed him softly but lingeringly on the mouth.

  twenty-two

  REDMOND, HERRING AND PERERRO picked Marks up at a few minutes past nine the next morning, Pererro at the wheel.

  “Who’s minding the store?” Marks asked.

  Redmond, whose mood was as gray as the sky overhead, said: “The Inspector himself came round to cheer us up.”

  “Yes,” Marks said, “he cheered me up this morning too. I failed to turn him in a report on yesterday’s business. But he’s right on one thing. I’ve goofed on Mather. He might have broken if we’d sweated him early.”

  “Let’s concentrate now on Corrales,” Redmond said. “At most Mather is accessory to the murder, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, to give the devil his due, I think that’s about right. He didn’t expect Bradley’s death. I spent the midnight hours doing up my own dossier on him. It reads like a term paper in psychology. I can’t wait to show it to the Inspector.”

  For the first time that morning Redmond laughed.

  They drove north through Central Park, up Seventh Avenue and then across to Lenox through a bleak and angry slum. Pererro pointed out one of the children’s homes he and Herring had visited.

  “Rats and rickets,” Herring said. “Uncle Sam, take it away. No hablo Español.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” Redmond said, reminded by Herring’s remark. “For his own convenience Corrales may not speak English.”

  “He got through clear enough to old Fred Bolardo at the lumberyard except for his name,” Herring said, “if he’s the same doc.” Then he added: “Man, he’s got to be.”

  As soon as they got out of the car, one of the men on the stake-out joined them and pointed out the second-floor window of Dr. Corrales’s office. The red brick building was roughly divided, first-floor shops, second-floor offices, and residential from there up to judge by the milk bottles, beer cans, and laundry in the windows.

  “Any patients with him?” Redmond asked.

  “No, sir. No morning office hours. He’s been on the phone most of the time.”

  “Is the place bugged?”

  “Yes, sir, but not by us.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Redmond growled.

  “Or that Corrales doesn’t know,” Marks added. “Where’s his car?”

  “The black sedan wedged into that no-parking zone.” The detective pointed to the corner.

  “Let’s get the technical truck up here,” Marks said. “The main thing: any fragments of glass that might have clung to his shoes, glass from an electric light bulb. There might just be a chance on the foot pedals.”

  Dr. Corrales looked startled as the four detectives walked through the shabby waiting room and through the open door of his office. Cutting his phone conversation short, he flashed them a smile. It was something he turned off and on easily, Marks thought, and his good looks came and went with it. He stood up to meet them. “Gentlemen of the police, I presume.”

  Redmond pocketed his identification. “You were expecting us, Doctor?”

  “I am not exactly a stranger to the American constabulary. I am sometimes honored, sometimes reprimanded. Which is it this morning?”

  No wonder Bolardo couldn’t understand him, Herring thought: he spoke too good English.

  Corrales motioned to several yellowing oak chairs. “Please.”

  Marks could not remember having encountered a revolutionary before, but from the quick intensity of the doctor’s eyes, he could suppose him a vivid example. He was lithe and muscular despite the slightness of his build. Forty.

  “We’d like to know your whereabouts last Monday, Doctor, from say six o’clock in the evening on.”

  “Monday the twenty-fourth.” Corrales flipped the pages back on his desk calendar, studied his appointments of the day, tracing them with a well-manicured finger. A hand scarcely to be associated with rats and rickets. “You know I suppose that I sometimes work at a clinic on Eleventh Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was there before six and until, perhaps, eight o’clock. Then I picked up my car and came uptown, stopping for my dinner at a favorite restaurant of mine—Las Palmas on Fourteenth Street. I sometimes meet with my friends there. I made two calls, yes—a child with pneumonia whom I moved that night from the Misericordia Orphanage on Lenox Avenue to the hospital.”

  “You moved the child yourself?”

  “Certainly not. I arranged the ambulance.”

  “What time was this, Doctor?”

  “It was well after ten when the ambulance got there. I was going to be late for a meeting.”

  “Let’s back up, Doctor. You went to dinner at, say, eight fifteen?”

  “Approximately.”

  “How long did you spend in the restaurant? We’ll check this, you know.”

  “An hour? It must have been about that. It’s my only relaxation.”

  “And what time did you reach the hospital?”

  “A quarter to ten? I can’t drive uptown in less than a half-hour.”

  “All right, Doctor. The other call? You said you made two.”

  “I stopped for a few minutes to pay my respects to the family of a friend—a funeral parlor on 108th Street near Lexington.”

  “What time, Doctor?”

  “Ten thirty?”

  “And the meeting, where was that?”

  For the first time Corrales showed his impatience. “In the old Hispanic Hall on East Ninetieth. I spoke last�
��and it was unfortunate. I should have been on the program earlier as scheduled. They lost money having me wind up the meeting, you see. The collection suffered. I am assuming you know the cause, gentlemen? Cuban liberation?”

  Herring had made notes throughout.

  At this point Marks took over the interrogation. “Dr. Corrales, you drive a black sedan—a 1959 Chevrolet?”

  “I do.”

  “May we have the keys to the car?”

  “For what purpose, may I ask?”

  “To examine the car.”

  “I understand that. But isn’t it time I was informed of the purpose of your visit? I’m not sure I shouldn’t have my lawyer present before we go any further.”

  “Suit yourself, Doctor. A man of some distinction was the victim of a homicidal attack—not far from your clinic.”

  “Ah, yes of course,” Corrales said, leaning back slowly in his chair with the air of someone suddenly realizing graver implications than he had at first suspected. “And closer still to where I have made the arrangement to park my car.” He took his car keys from his pocket and offered them.

  Pererro took them and left.

  “An unusual parking arrangement, wouldn’t you say?” Marks continued.

  “Not at all. I had been the victim of having my car broken into.”

  “Something of value was stolen, Doctor?”

  Corrales hesitated. “Yes, Lieutenant, a case of surgical instruments.”

  Marks heard the sound, almost a snort, from Redmond: he had predicted that the doctor would have a story waiting for them. He did not take his eyes from Corrales, however, and leaning on the desk he asked: “And a handkerchief, Doctor?”

  “There were several—two or three at least in the case.”

  “Did you report the theft to the police?”

  “I did not—which is why I am now distressed. The physicist was knifed, was he not?”