The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  “I’ll have to see your father,” he said. “Tell him I—couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Men,” she said. “If it makes you happy. When you take me home—afterward.”

  The cab went downtown, down Park and Fourth. The traffic had thinned; the cab rolled fast. From Broadway they went through Eleventh, across University Place. The cab driver said, “Here you are,” and knocked up the meter flag. He was paid, and drove away.

  “Wait,” Barbara said. “I’ll look for that friend of mine. Her name’s Hilda Zook. The poor thing.”

  They had arranged that, John, at first reluctantly. She would look at mailboxes, seeking the name of a friend—a friend, as it turned out, improbably named Zook. And seeing who there was to see. He had protested. She had said, “Nonsense. It’s the most innocent-seeming thing in the world.”

  He waited only briefly. She reappeared at the apartment house door and nodded. The small lobby was empty; neither the janitor Pedersen nor policemen lurked there. Upstairs might well be different. They went up in the automatic elevator. In the corridor upstairs no one waited.

  The key from the pocket of the too-loud jacket fitted. It had been inevitable that it would fit; otherwise, it was meaningless, part of no pattern. That there be a pattern was essential. John pushed the door open and reached for the light switch, and two lamps in the sunken living room went on. Then he stopped, and looked at his hand, still raised.

  “I knew where it was,” he said slowly, and to his own ears his voice seemed to come from far off.

  “What?” Barbara said. “Oh—oh for heaven’s sake, John.” She took both his arms in her hands, faced him. “You’re too big to shake,” she said. Her eyes were very bright. “You’re an idiot.” She released his arms. “Where else would it be?” she said. “They’re always there.”

  He looked down at her.

  “You know, then?” he said.

  “That you’ve had a bad time,” she said. “That you have more imagination than’s good for you. The last I’ve known for months.”

  “That I—” he said, and stopped in bewilderment. “I?”

  “Who else?” she said. “There are hundreds of apartments like this one. Light switches are always in pretty much the same place. Where else?” She stopped for a moment. “We’re wasting time,” she said. “Have they taken the picture?”

  From the raised entrance platform, John could not tell. They went down into the living room. The photograph was where it had been, on a small table. The daffodils were no longer there.

  They looked at the photograph. “You were playing tennis,” she said. “Had been, or were going to. I’d guess, going to.”

  The background was out of focus. There was the faint tracing of what might be the wire netting of a backstop. Beyond that, there was, even more faintly, part of a tree—apparently a big tree, fully in leaf. The surface of the court was not visible; the photograph showed John’s body only above the waist.

  There was not much to go on. Some place in the country, since only in the country, recently, had he played tennis; somewhere with a tree near the court. He had, the summer before, played as a guest at several clubs—in Westchester, on Long Island. He had played on Al Curtis’s private court, with Al and two other men, whom he had known by given names, for a few hours and now did not remember. He had played—

  She couldn’t help with that, Barbara thought. In another way she might. What kind of girl was the girl who had lived here, who had died here? What kind of clothes had she worn? What scent had she used?

  Barbara left John standing by the little table, looking at the photograph. He was so intent—intent in his effort to recapture memory—that he did not, she thought, know that she had left, had walked across the living room and into the bedroom. She found a light switch there and flicked it up, and lamps went on on a dressing table. At what she saw, Barbara Phillips for a moment raised a surprised hand to her lips.

  There were twin beds in the room, and on one of them clothing was piled—had, apparently, been thrown. Woolen dresses and cotton dresses and silk dresses; a silk suit and a woolen suit; two evening dresses, one of them long; a very pretty, very fragile, negligee—all piled helter-skelter on the bed.

  For a moment, Barbara’s chief feeling was one of regret that pretty things should be so treated—it was a feeling, almost, of sympathy for the pretty things. But then she went from the doorway to the bed and began to pick up the garments, one by one—the negligee, the short evening dress. The girl had been size ten; she had had good taste. And, she had had money to spend.

  Without thinking, acting almost instinctively, Barbara looked for the shop’s label in the evening dress she held. Fifth Avenue it would be, almost certainly—or Madison, or Fifty-seventh Street.

  There was no label.

  This did not, of course, mean anything. Labels are lightly sewed on; not infrequently, they fall off. (To a coat, a girl would sew a label back, if it was the label of a good shop. On an evening dress, or a negligee, a girl probably would not bother.) Still idly, Barbara picked up one of the woolen dresses and again looked for the label. And, again, there was no label.

  But this time, she took the dress across the room to the light, and held it under the light and bent over it. The label had not merely pulled loose. It had been cut out. Cut ends of thread were evident.

  She worked quickly, then. Garment by garment she went over the pretty things on the bed, laying them aside more neatly, more tenderly, than they had been laid. Before she had gone far, she realized what she would discover—that from each of the things which had hung in the girl’s closet, the label had been cut. Probably, Barbara thought, with a pair of manicure scissors.

  Except for one—a sheath of wool, dark green. From that, she was almost certain, the label had not been neatly cut. An end of thread hung loose. That label had been pulled off. Or—had merely worked loose and fallen off? In that case, it might be anywhere. It might be on the closet floor.

  Until she had looked for the label in the evening dress, and found it gone, and then found it gone in the second dress, Barbara’s interest had been idle—the passing interest of one woman in the source of another woman’s clothes. But now the interest was active, since the implication was obvious. The labels had been removed to hamper identification of the girl who had died under the name of Nora Evans, but might at some time have lived under another.

  Barbara groped for, and found, a dangling cord in the closet, and pulled at it, and a small bulk in the ceiling went on. She crouched and began to search the floor. She was searching, handicapped by the darkness of her own shadow, when she heard sounds from the living room. She stood up—

  There was the sound of something heavy falling to a padded surface—the sound of feet running on the padded surface. Then there was a muffled exclamation, wordless—a kind of involuntary “uh!” And then, again, there was a sound of someone running on a carpeted floor.

  By then, Barbara was herself running—out of the closet, across the room, to the door of the living room.

  The room was dark, except for the light which flowed into it in a narrow path from the open bedroom door—a path of light in which her own shadow was large, distorted.

  “John!” she called. “John!”

  There was no answer. She went into the dark room and called again, and now there was something near panic in her voice.

  But then she heard the sound of a door closing, and almost at once the lights came on in the room.

  John walked from the entrance door of the apartment, down the steps to the sunken living room. As he came toward her, he rubbed his forehead with the heel of his right hand.

  “Got away,” John said. “Must have gone down the stairs.”

  “Are you all right?” she said. “Tell me. Are you all right?”

  “What?” he said, and then, “Oh, sure. I’m all right. He got the photograph. Rammed into me. Knocked me into a chair or something. Grabbed the picture and—”

&nbs
p; He walked past her quickly, to the door to the kitchen; the door at the far end of the living room. He was there only a moment. He reached up to the wall and there was the click of a light switch and the lights went out. Almost at once, the switch clicked again, and there was light. He walked back to her.

  “Hiding in the kitchen,” he said. “There’s a three-way switch. Turn the lights on and off from either end of the room. Then—he ran for it. Knocked me out of the way. He was on me before I heard him. I chased him, but he got away.”

  “You’re not hurt?” she said.

  “No.” He paused. “What would anybody want in the kitchen?”

  Barbara shook her head quickly.

  “Come here,” she said. “It wasn’t what he was doing in the kitchen.”

  He followed her into the bedroom. She showed him what she had found. She held up the green dress. “Except for this one,” she said. “This one whoever it was didn’t cut. Merely jerked at. Unless—”

  They had not heard footsteps. They heard only a voice, from the doorway. It was a hard voice, without inflection. “Keeping busy?” the voice said.

  They turned. Detective Grady was in the doorway. Shapiro was behind him. Grady answered his own question, in the same voice. “Keeping real busy, aren’t they, Nate?” he said. “Taking care of evidence, wouldn’t you say, Nate? Who are you, lady?”

  “Barbara Phillips,” she said. “And who are you, gentlemen?”

  “He’s Grady,” John said, before Grady answered. “Grady and Shapiro.”

  Barbara Phillips said, “Oh,” with a careful avoidance of cordiality.

  “So,” Grady said, “you’re the Phillips girl. She’s the Phillips girl, Nate.” He looked at her. He looked very carefully, as if at an object. “Gets around, doesn’t he?” Grady said. “Get around, don’t you, Mr. Hayward?”

  Involuntarily, John took a step toward him. “No!” Barbara said and Grady said, “The lady’s right, Mr. Hayward.” John stopped. “So,” Grady said, “you used the key. We thought you might. Didn’t we, Nate? But you didn’t wear the jacket. Showy thing, the jacket.”

  “Yeah,” Detective Shapiro said, in his soft sad voice. “We thought you might, Mr. Hayward.”

  “I suppose,” John said, “that that’s why you put it there? The jacket with the key in the pocket?”

  “You get funny ideas,” Grady said. “Don’t he, Nate?”

  Shapiro, this time, merely nodded, sadly.

  “What would we put it there for?” Grady said. “You can do better than that, can’t you? It was there when we—” He stopped. “We knew it was there,” he said.

  “When you searched my apartment,” John said.

  A little elaborately, Grady pantomimed astonished innocence. Then he was reproachful. “You know we’d have to have a search warrant,” he said. “Anybody serve a warrant on you, Mr. Hayward? How you going to prove we were there? Anybody see us there?”

  “All right,” John said, “you can see through walls.”

  “On the other hand,” Grady said, “you’re here, aren’t you? Revisiting the scene, they call it. Anybody say you could come here?”

  “According to you,” John said, “I was paying the rent. You can’t have it both ways, can you?”

  As a triumph it was small, but in its small way satisfying.

  “Smart cooky, isn’t he, Nate?” Grady said. “We’re horsing around. You like to horse around, Mr. Hayward?”

  John said nothing.

  “The labels on the dresses,” Grady said. “That was a cute one. Afraid we’ll find out who the girl was, Mr. Hayward? Check back on her, from where she bought the stuff? Not a bad idea. Thought he might try that, or something like it, didn’t we, Nate?”

  This time, Shapiro said, “Yeah.”

  “Something like that,” Grady said. “And that nice picture of him. What did you do with the picture, Mr. Hayward? And the dress labels? You and Miss Phillips here. Down the incinerator chute outside?”

  “No,” John said. “Somebody got here ahead of us. And—was still here when we came. You—I’d think you’d have run into him.”

  Grady sighed, deeply.

  “Mr. Whoseit,” Grady said. “The same old gag. All right, Mr. Hayward. You tell it.”

  John told it. He told it, evidently, to disbelieving ears.

  “Quite a story,” Grady said. “You see this—this man of mystery, Miss Phillips? Have green hair, or anything? Easy to pick up, if he had green hair.”

  “You’re really very cute,” Barbara said. “You work at it very hard.”

  “Lady,” Grady said, “your papa runs a bank. You’re an important young lady. Did you see this man you say got the picture? You say got the labels?”

  “No,” she said. “I was in here. I was looking on the closet floor. I thought maybe he’d dropped one. I heard sounds. Someone running. When I got to the door, he’d got away.”

  “No green hair,” Grady said. “That’s too bad. Did you make some noises for the lady, Mr. Hayward? Struggle noises? Running noises?”

  “No,” John said. “But it’s no good, is it? You and Miller’ve got it all worked out.”

  “Yeah,” Grady said. “That’s right. All worked out. Oh—we made a list of the labels. Got a policewoman to describe the dresses and things they were on. Checked them out. Some very nice stores the boys and girls have been visiting. And you know what? Ones we can check back on, Miss Evans bought. Paid cash. So now we know that. And that nice picture of you. We made copies of that. Several copies. So you don’t have to worry about having it grabbed that way.”

  “And,” John said, “left everything here hoping someone would—come around to tidy up? That’s the way you work it?”

  “One of the ways,” Grady said. “We’ve got lots of ways, haven’t we, Nate? And—surprise surprise—look who came to tidy up. Knocks us over with a fender, like the lady used to say on the radio. Don’t it, Nate?”

  But Nathan Shapiro had wandered off. They could, after a moment, hear him. He appeared to be in the kitchen.

  “Don’t take anything for granted. That’s Detective Shapiro,” Grady said. “Maybe, he thinks, this man of yours left a card or something. Benefit-of-the-doubt-Shapiro.”

  “For you,” Barbara said, “there isn’t any doubt, is there?”

  “Nope,” Grady said. “If I had my way—” He stopped.

  There was no need for him to continue. He was explicit enough, in words, in tone.

  “But the trouble is,” John said, “you don’t even know if her name was Evans.”

  “O.K.,” Grady said. “You’re a very smart cooky. Everybody admits you’re a very smart cooky. Now you’ve got a very smart lady helping—very smart, important young lady, whose papa owns a bank.” He raised his voice. “Nate,” he said, and Shapiro came in. Shapiro shook his head.

  “Not a chance in a hundred,” Grady said, “but let’s see if they’ve got them on them.”

  “Turn your pockets out, Mr. Hayward,” Shapiro said. “Let’s see if you’ve got ’em.”

  Hayward took articles from his pockets, turned the pockets inside out. Shapiro ran expert hands over him. He said, “Nope.”

  “Like I said,” Grady said, “probably the incinerator.” He looked at Barbara. A lightweight woolen dress molded her slender body. She looked at him steadily. “O.K.,” Grady said, “we’ll settle for your bag.” Her bag was on a chest of drawers. She emptied it on the top of the chest of drawers. “O.K.,” Grady said. “We go through the forms. All right. Get going. Don’t come back.”

  Barbara went first out of the bedroom. “Figure,” Grady told John Hayward, “that your lease has expired. And—I’ll take that key.” John gave him the key.

  “Oh yes,” Grady said, “we showed that jacket to some people. Pedersen, one of them was. Said you wore it when you came here, part of the time.”

  “I thought you didn’t—” John began, and was interrupted; was told to be his age.

  “Found it ther
e,” Grady said. “Two of us—Nate and me. We can swear to that. If we took it away and showed it to some people and put it back—but who says we did that, Mr. Hayward? We say it was there first night when we picked it up. When you let us in. See how it figures?”

  “In other words, you’re willing to lie.”

  “Who says? A man who strangles a girl half his size? A girl, maybe, coming to him to be kissed?”

  He looked at John, and looked at him with hatred.

  “Get going,” Grady said. “While you can.”

  There was, John thought, no use going on with it—not with Grady. He and Barbara walked the length of the living room, with the detectives watching them, Grady implacable, and Shapiro looking very, very sad.

  “We only made it worse,” John said, when they were in a cab, going up Fifth. “Now Grady is surer than ever.”

  “But,” Barbara said, “someone isn’t. Because they don’t know who the girl is.” Then she said, “It’s cold, isn’t it. Put your arms around me.” He put his arms around her. She was trembling. But it was not really cold.

  She quieted in his arms. She was herself again when they reached the Phillips house—a house set shoulder to shoulder with its neighbors but, as such houses go in New York, broad of shoulder. It was taken for granted that he would come in with her. He followed her in.

  Stairs ran up from the entrance hall. To the right of the hall, beyond a wide doorway, was the library. Martin Phillips sat in a deep chair, under a light. He took off his glasses and laid them on a book open in his lap. Then, rather slowly, he laid book and glasses on a table and stood up.

  “Well,” John said, “it was no good, sir. You were right, and I promised but—it was no good.”

  “Evidently,” Martin Phillips said. “Very evidently. She is too much for both of us. And—too much to be protected.”

  “It wasn’t ever,” Barbara said, “not ever, one of your better ideas, father.”

  “Perhaps not,” Martin Phillips said. He looked from one to the other, longest at his daughter.

  “Facts don’t mean anything, do they?” he said. He looked at John. “Is she right, Hayward?”