The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  They explained that. They were very careful to explain that. They told him it was no good to go on denying he had known Nora Evans, that he had rented an apartment for her in, as it turned out—but they did not, explicitly, tell him what they were certain he knew—to be in East Eleventh Street, just beyond Fifth Avenue.

  “Say you didn’t kill her,” Miller said, in his soft voice, leaning toward John. He sat on, bulged over, one of the straight wooden chairs. He leaned forward, his legs spread, a big hand on either big knee. “You got a right to say that. Anybody’s got a right to say he didn’t kill.”

  “I didn’t know her,” John said. “I never saw her alive. How could I have killed her?”

  “Maybe you didn’t mean to kill her,” Miller said, his soft voice gentle, encouraging. “Maybe you were horsing around with her, the way people do sometimes. Maybe you put a hand on her throat to hold her off—something like that. See what I mean? Or maybe she came at you with something—got mad because you were walking out—and all you planned to do was hold her off. Didn’t realize how little it takes, sometimes, to kill that way. Sometimes you hit that—what d’they call it, Marty?”

  “Carotid sinus,” Martinelli said. “Sure, it could have happened that way, Mr. Hayward. Almost amount to an accident if it happened that way.”

  But it would not amount to that—not to Miller, not to Assistant District Attorney Martinelli. They did not need to tell him that.

  “I didn’t know her,” John said, and they shook their heads at him. They asked him what was the use of saying that.

  “Tell you how it could have been,” Grady said. “Maybe this was the way it was. Maybe when you went there this afternoon she was already dead. Maybe somebody’d been there earlier—maybe somebody else who figured she was two-timing him. See what I mean? Maybe when you found she was dead you got panicky. First idea was to get out of there. Could have been that way.”

  “Sure,” Miller said. “You’ve got something there, Grady. You—”

  “I was never there,” John said. “I never saw the apartment. I never saw the girl alive.”

  They listened. They paid no attention—no real attention. Perhaps he knew about another man? Perhaps Nora Evans had told him about this other man? A man she had known before she met John Hayward? Had parted from? Perhaps a man who had made threats—jealous threats—which she had not taken seriously? Things happened like that. Mr. Hayward must know they happened like that. He would not want to protect this other man—if there was another man.

  “She was a pretty girl,” Miller said, and his soft voice was sad. “Couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three. I’ve got a daughter about that age.” He paused. “Makes you think,” he added.

  But John said over what he had said before, and they shook their heads as they had shaken them before. But they did not lose patience. Even Martinelli, of the sharp face, the sharper voice, did not lose patience. They did not threaten—except that the whole mass of their disbelief was in itself a threat. They did not touch him; they did not use harsh lights to torment his eyes. They let him smoke. His mouth grew hot and dry from cigarettes smoked too rapidly, yet he smoked on, hardly realizing what he did. When his lighter failed after an hour or so, Miller provided matches. When, finally, John found his pack empty, and crumpled it and tossed it on the table, Miller took a pack from his pocket and put it within reach.

  For more than an hour they told him no more than that the girl was dead, that she had been killed in an apartment in East Eleventh Street, that she had been his girl—finally, that he had killed her. But they would, John began to believe, have been content—for the time content—if he had only admitted that he knew her, that she had been his girl. That he would not admit this, take advantage of one of the alternatives they offered—another man as murderer, murder as an accident—puzzled them. Slowly, he began to realize this. He kept saying the wrong thing. Grady had told him that, across the body of the murdered girl. Miller told him that. Martinelli told him that. It did not, he thought, alter their certainty. It merely puzzled them.

  Another man came in after this had gone on for almost two hours. He was named Garfield. He was a lieutenant— “’Lo, lieutenant,” Miller said. “Took a while, didn’t it?”

  Garfield had black hair and black eyes. He was in his middle forties, when he spoke the words came very rapidly, but with sharp precision.

  “Says he didn’t know her,” Miller told Garfield, and Garfield looked at John, with no expression in his eyes. “Says he was never at the apartment.”

  Garfield took an envelope out of his pocket. He took a piece of paper from the envelope and put it down in front of John. It was a check. It was drawn on the Riverside National Bank. It was payable to the Applegate-Meyer Realty Corporation. It was for one hundred and sixty-five and no one hundredths dollars. It was signed “John Hayward.”

  John looked at it, and a kind of numbness invaded his mind. It was, for a moment, as if, between him and reality, there was a pane of glass—a pane of glass invisible, but impenetrable. It was as if his mind pushed at the glass.

  They waited.

  “It looks like my signature,” John Hayward said, in an expressionless voice which was not his own. “I didn’t write it. I have no account at that bank.” The glass seemed to dissolve. The mistake was there; now they would see the mistake. It might not be until Monday, but then a telephone call would do it. “No,” the bank manager would say, “we have no depositor named—”

  “For this month’s rent,” Garfield said. “Reached the office this morning, so they hadn’t got around to depositing it.” He looked at John, and John shook his head. “Had to get hold of the bookkeeper,” Garfield said, and this was an aside to Miller, to Martinelli. “Get him down there.”

  “Break,” Miller said.

  “Yes,” Garfield said. “A break. Mr. Hayward pays regularly, a few days before the first.” He had not looked away from John. “The checks have always cleared, Mr. Hayward,” he said. “So you have got an account, evidently. You’re a banker. You can see that.”

  John picked the check up. He held it so the light fell brightly on it. It was a forgery, of course. There would be something— He could not see anything. If he had not known, he would have accepted the signature without question. If he had still worked a teller’s window he would have accepted it without question.

  “It’s a forgery,” he said. “Very good. But I didn’t write it.”

  He knew, then. It was not a mistake. It was not anything so disorderly as a mistake. It was a thing prepared; a trap set.

  They shook their heads. They seemed to pity him. They did not even bother to answer him. Garfield picked the check up and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in his pocket.

  “Why did you kill her, Mr. Hayward?” Miller asked, in the same soft voice. “Because she was in the way? Because of Miss Phillips? Because—”

  He stopped. John was not listening. It was a trap set by someone. It was a trap set by a murderer—a trap artfully constructed by— His mind whirled. By whom? Someone who had reached out at random—put the set trap in a path on which anybody— But it was not that; not as simple as that. By someone who hated him? Might even kill a girl to spring a trap of hate? By—

  “Listen, Mr. Hayward,” Miller said in his soft voice, not even bothering to raise his voice. “Was it because of Barbara Phillips? Because Miss Evans threatened to spill her story if you left her? Spill it to Miss Phillips? And because that would break things up between you and Miss Phillips? Finding out you were keeping this girl while you were—”

  “No,” John said. “I wasn’t keeping Miss Evans. I never—”

  “The wrong thing,” Miller said. “You keep on saying the wrong thing.” But, still, there was only patience in his voice. “You’ve been seeing a lot of Miss Phillips. From what we hear. Say you two make a very—”

  For the first time, John interrupted.

  “You’ve been to her?” he said. “
Been badgering her? Her father?”

  Miller looked at Lieutenant Garfield.

  “Not yet,” Garfield said. “You wouldn’t like that, would you, Mr. Hayward? With Mr. Phillips so high up at the bank. In a position to push you along? Or the other way around.” He paused. “Would have been,” he added.

  “And,” Miller said, “with the Phillipses having all that money.”

  John merely shook his head. It was true enough. Martin Phillips was a senior vice president at the bank. Martin Phillips had a lot of money. Those things had nothing to do with him and Barbara. But it would have been impossible for John to have said this to Miller and Garfield; said it to be noted down by the man in uniform, the police stenographer.

  “You were going to marry Miss Phillips?” Miller said.

  John answered steadily.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am going to marry Miss Phillips.”

  They were puzzled again, he thought, and this time by the change of tense. Because they were quite certain he had killed a girl, and so was not going to marry anyone. There was more to the trap into which he had walked, whistling—not quite on pitch—a tune from a show to which he had taken his girl. There had to be.

  II

  There was more. There was the matter of two white shirts.

  They were quite ordinary shirts. They were made of a good quality of broadcloth; they had collar points of moderate length. They came from Brooks Brothers. He was shown the shirts about an hour after he had been shown the check on the Riverside National Bank, Murray Hill Branch.

  It had grown hot in the room, and the room was filled with smoke. John began to cough, from the smoke in the room and from the hot smoke he drew into his throat and lungs. They waited while he coughed. At a nod from Miller, the uniformed man went out of the room and came back with a pitcher of water and several glasses. The water was warmish from the tap, but John drank thirstily.

  “Maybe,” Miller said, “you’d like a cup of coffee? A hamburger, maybe?” He paused, briefly. “We don’t want you to say we tried to wear you down,” he added. “We’re not trying to do that.”

  “Not that way,” John said. “No, I don’t want anything to eat.”

  “However you want it,” Miller said. “Grady, want to get those things?”

  Grady got up and went out. He came back with something around which brown paper was folded. He took the paper off and handed two shirts to Miller. Miller put them on the table in front of John Hayward. John looked at them without touching them. They were stretched over laundry cardboard.

  “Yours, aren’t they?” Miller said, in his soft, patient voice.

  “I don’t know,” John said. “I wear shirts like these.”

  “Yes,” Miller said. “You’re wearing one now, Mr. Hayward. They’re your shirts.” John looked at him. “Laundry marks,” Miller said. He pointed to the mark on the inside of the collar. The mark was “HH201.”

  “Your mark,” Miller told him.

  It was vaguely familiar to John. He could not, without prompting, have said how the laundry marked his shirts, but “HH201” was probably the way. Anyway, they would have checked on that.

  “All right,” John said. “Probably they’re mine.”

  “Sure,” Miller said. “Two or three pairs of shorts, too. In Miss Evans’s apartment. What did you want to kill the girl for, Mr. Hayward?”

  “No,” John said. “It’s the way I said. I never knew the girl. I was never in the apartment. You see what it is?”

  Miller shook his big head, sadly.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “No good saying we’re framing you. What would we want to frame you for? What would we have against you?” He shook his head again, slowly—very slowly. “We just work here,” he said. “That’s all there is to it, Mr. Hayward.”

  “Not you,” John said. “I don’t say that.”

  “Not anybody,” Miller said. “You kept the girl. You killed the girl. Simple as that. Probably because she was going to spill things to Miss Phillips.”

  “I’d be a louse,” John said. “Do I look like a louse?”

  “No,” Miller said. “You look pretty much like anybody. But—sure you’re a louse. Not that I give a damn, or Marty here. Or anybody. How you explain about the shirts?”

  “Whoever killed the girl,” John said, “rented the apartment for her. Is doing all this—did do all this—to put it on to me.”

  “Oh,” Martinelli said. “For the love of God, Mr. Hayward.”

  “He’s got a right,” Miller said. “He’s got a right to say anything. Why would anybody do that, Mr. Hayward? Because you know where the body’s buried? Because you’ve been stealing somebody’s toys? You tell us, Mr. Hayward.”

  “I don’t know why,” John said. “Somebody did. I never knew the girl.”

  They all listened. They shook their heads. Miller looked at his watch, and then John looked at his. It was ten minutes of five.

  “No,” Miller said. “We’ll go on for a while. Unless you’ve decided—”

  John shook his head. He lighted another cigarette from Miller’s pack, using Miller’s matches.

  “So we don’t make any mistake,” Garfield said, “because we don’t want to make a mistake, what were you doing yesterday afternoon?”

  He said this rapidly—very distinctly, but very rapidly. Adjusted to the slow, soft speech of Miller, almost intolerably weary, John’s mind lagged for an instant. He hesitated. And he could see in their faces, reaction to his hesitancy. In spite of himself, there was a kind of quiver in his brain. But then it was gone.

  “I asked—” Garfield began, and John spoke quickly, and steadily. “What I was doing yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I heard you.”

  They waited. John did not hurry, but he did not, in the sense they wanted, hesitate. He spoke as one thinking, remembering, seeking exactitude. He had had lunch at the Harvard Club. Was that where they wanted him to begin?

  “Go ahead,” Garfield said. “You had lunch.”

  He had gone to the club alone, with no plans before evening. He said merely that he had gone alone. He had stopped at the bar, and he had met an acquaintance at the bar. A man named Curtis—Alfred Curtis. After a drink—

  “Two drinks,” Garfield said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “If you know all this—” John began, and checked himself. “Two drinks,” he said. “It was Saturday.”

  “Sure,” Miller said. “Since it was Saturday.”

  But somehow, obscurely, the correction put him in the wrong. It was unfair that it should. John felt resentment beginning in his mind. He forced his mind to coolness.

  He and Alfred Curtis, after two drinks each, had had lunch. They wouldn’t care what they’d eaten—

  “All the same,” Garfield said. “Just to keep things straight.”

  John had had consommé. A minute steak. Au gratin potatoes. Coffee.

  “And a salad,” Garfield said. “Not that it makes any difference.”

  Curtis had had—

  “All right,” Garfield said. “When was this? When you ate?”

  It had probably been one-thirty, or a quarter of two, when they had begun to eat. It was probably around two-thirty, or a few minutes later, when they finished coffee and cigarettes. Curtis had told him about a place in the West Indies where Curtis had spent several weeks during the winter. John had expressed envy. The bank was conservative. Holidays were for summertime, for those under the rank of vice president.

  “Then?”

  Then they had walked through the club, and out of it into Forty-fourth Street. John had left Curtis waiting for a cab. John had gone home and spent the rest of the afternoon at his apartment.

  He stopped, because Garfield was shaking his head.

  “Sure,” John said, “that’s—”

  “Man named Woodson,” Garfield said. “‘Pit’ Woodson, they call him. You’ve left him out. Why’d you leave him out, Mr. Hayward?”

  John had forgotten Pi
t Woodson—P. I. T. Woodson. He started to say that that was very easy; that, to most people it was even very desirable. He did not say either thing.

  “I’d forgotten that,” John said. “We did run into Woodson going out. He wanted us to stay around and make up a table of bridge.”

  “Yes,” Garfield said. “So he told us. And—you told him you couldn’t. Because you had a date. Remember that, Mr. Hayward?”

  “I don’t—” John began, and stopped because probably he had. It was the sort of thing you told Pit Woodson; it was the sort of thing that a great many men told Pit Woodson, often even before he had had time to ask them to help make up a table of bridge. Men said, with the utmost cordiality, “Hi, Pit,” and sometimes even, when their consciences were tender, “Hi, Pit old man.” And then, as Pit Woodson started to open his mouth, they said, “Got to be running along. Late already.” And ran.

  “Very likely I did,” John said.

  “But you didn’t have a date, you say? Not with the Evans girl?”

  “Not with anybody,” John said. “If I told him that—” He paused. “Well,” he said, “poor old Pit is a God-awful bore.”

  He had phrased it badly. He had spoken too intimately; it was as if he had sought to bring Miller and Garfield, Martinelli and Grady, into a companionship of understanding. And Pit was, after all, a member of the club.

  But they merely looked at him, their faces neither accepting nor rejecting. The police stenographer made a note in the book in front of him, and then waited, his pencil point touching the paper. He did not look at John at all.

  “About a quarter of three, say, you left the club,” Garfield said, after the pause had lengthened. “Took a cab to your apartment? Got there in—what? Five minutes? Ten? About three o’clock, say?”

  “No,” John said. “It was later than that. Three-thirty. Probably a quarter of four. You see—I didn’t take a cab. Walked.”