The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  “I was here yesterday,” she said. “Barbara Phillips. With—”

  “Of course,” Father Higbee said. “Of course, of course. It’s the wrong glasses again, I’m afraid.” He moved close to her; he was only a little taller. Unexpectedly, he held out both hands to her. There was a good deal of earth on his hands, and they were stained green from weeds. She took them gladly. “My dear,” he said, “there has been a sad thing—a very sad thing. Mrs. Piermont—we were talking of her only yesterday—”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s the reason I’ve come back, Father. They think—” She stopped. “They’ve arrested John.”

  “My dear,” he said. “My dear child.” He rubbed his hands on his trousers. “Come,” he said, “we’ll have a cup of tea.” He appeared about to pat her shoulder. He looked at his hand and shook his head.

  They went into the white rectory, and into the room where they had talked the day before. He told her to sit down; that he would be only a moment. He went out and almost at once returned. “Margaret is making tea,” he said.

  “Father,” she said, “when did it happen? When was she killed?”

  “This morning,” he said. “Very early, they say. I was not called. But—news spreads. It is not always accurate news, but it always spreads.”

  “Just when?” she said. “Do you know? And—how did it happen?”

  “I think about two o’clock,” he said. “Mrs. Kellems heard the police siren a little after that. It awakened her. Mrs. Kellems—” He paused. “There is little Mrs. Kellems does not hear,” he added. “They say Angela apparently heard someone downstairs. Moving about. And went down. That would have been like Angela. She was—” He paused again. “A direct person,” he said. “A courageous woman. She went down, I suppose, with her cane.”

  “Father—” Barbara said, and stopped. A small, spare woman in a house dress came in, carrying a large round tray. “Already had the water on,” the woman said. She smiled at Barbara, and smiled sweetly. “There is nothing,” she said, “like a good hot cup of tea.” She put the tray down on Father Higbee’s desk. “You ought,” she told him, “to wash your hands, Father.” He looked at his hands. “Indeed yes,” he said, and began to pour tea. “Isn’t that just like him?” the spare woman said, contentedly, and went out. “On the other hand,” Father Higbee said, “it is clean dirt. And the vital juices of growing things. Drink your tea, my dear. Your boy will be all right.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked him. “Everything’s wrong, Father. Everything. You merely say that because—because it’s the thing to say. Don’t you?”

  “You mean,” he said, “because I am a clergyman, and therefore unctuous? No, my dear. I sat here with you and the boy.” Somehow, John sounded very young; it was as if they were both children. “He would not kill an old woman,” Father Higbee said. “Since he did not—”

  “Innocence isn’t enough,” she said. “You know that. Even truth isn’t enough.”

  “In the end,” he said. “But you don’t mean that, of course. Do drink your tea.”

  She drank. The tea was hot. It was strong. It seemed almost to reach a coldness in her.

  “I realize,” he said, “the importance of intelligence, my dear. Of—determination. You both have both. So, he will be all right. Have a piece of toast.”

  She shook her head.

  Father Higbee reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a package of cigarettes. The package looked rather as if it had been sat on. He partially extracted two cigarettes and peered at them. He made a slight face at the cigarettes and then held the package toward her. She took a cigarette, and he took the other, and held a match across the desk, then to his own cigarette.

  “Angela Piermont,” he said, “was a wealthy woman. A very rich woman, by my standards. But in any case, wealthy.”

  She was puzzled.

  “You mean,” she said, “there might have been a lot of money in the house? That whoever killed her was only after money? Only a burglar?”

  “I was not thinking of that,” he said. “You may be right, of course. I was thinking—” He stopped and puffed at his cigarette. He seemed to nibble at it. “Julie would have inherited a great deal of money, again by my standards, if she had outlived Angela,” he said. “Indeed, except for provision for Ebenezer Titus—he helped around the place, you know—she would have inherited all of it. I witnessed Angela’s will. She invited me to read it. I—”

  It had been almost a year ago. Mrs. Angela Piermont had, first, telephoned. Then, in a Rolls-Royce—a very elderly, very tall, Rolls-Royce, with Ebenezer Titus driving—she had appeared at the rectory. She had produced her will—a handwritten will, very short. She had asked Father Higbee to witness her signature, and that he call in Margaret Kellems—“my housekeeper, my dear”—as the other witness.

  “I told her,” Father Higbee said, “that I believed witnesses were unnecessary, since the will was a holograph. She said, ‘Nonsense, man. Whatever gave you that idea?’ “Nevertheless,” Father Higbee told Barbara, “I still believe I was right. But two more signatures could do not harm. All the money went to Julie, as I said. And—there was no provision for what was to happen if Julie died first. I pointed that out to Angela.”

  He had pointed it out. She had said, “Nonsense. She’s a young girl. I’m an old woman.” Father Higbee had reminded her that in the midst of life we are in death, regardless of age. He had been told that that was all very well to say, but not a thing any rational person believed. She had said, further, that it didn’t matter to her. If Julie wasn’t alive, “they could scramble for it.”

  “They?” Barbara said.

  “Relatives,” Father Higbee said. “Everyone has relatives. The rich have more than most.” He put the cigarette, which had gone out, carefully on the edge of his desk. Almost at once, he knocked it to the floor with an elbow. “Now,” he said, “they may be expected to appear. As Angela said, they will come out of cracks. She was—” He hesitated. “A forthright person. Perhaps not compassionate.”

  “Father Higbee,” Barbara said. “Don’t you see? Who are these relatives? Who gets the money?”

  He smiled at her.

  “Yes, my dear,” he said. “I do see. Really I do. But I do not know who the relatives are. Or who inherits. Time will tell. I assure you, time will tell.”

  She looked at him. He nodded.

  “They will be distant relatives,” he said. “If they were close, I would have heard about them, I imagine. But—one will be closer than the others. So, one—or perhaps two or three—will inherit. A distant cousin, perhaps. The scent of money will draw them out.”

  “Father,” Barbara said, “people kill for money. More often, probably, than for any other thing.”

  “Regrettably,” Father Higbee said. “Most regrettably. Let me pour you another cup of tea.”

  So that was where they were, Shapiro thought, and stopped the black sedan some distance from the rectory. He could interview the preacher another time. It was a little surprising that the car had not already been picked up.

  Since he had left Grady in New York and driven back to the country—and why he was the one who had to leave familiar streets for these odd open spaces he didn’t know—Shapiro had been somewhat out of touch. He had been nosing around, as a guest of the county detective and the State Police. Detectives, even detectives first grade, are told only what they need to know. Now, inconspicuous in his inconspicuous car, he waited.

  But when the girl came out of the rectory, Hayward was not with her. Possibly, Shapiro thought, they’ve tumbled to it. Perhaps he’s hiding out. He looked thoughtfully at the rectory, at the same time putting the car in gear. If Hayward had decided to hole up, it seemed a little improbable that he would hole up with a clergyman. One never knew, of course. Damn’ funny things could happen, in the country particularly. But following the girl looked like being the best bet.

  He followed the Corvette. He followed it back through Katonah
, and, at Bedford Hills, on to the Saw Mill River Parkway. The girl didn’t seem to be in any great hurry, which was as well.

  A Jaguar passed Shapiro, and then passed the Corvette. It did seem to be in a hurry. Well, Shapiro thought, he wasn’t a traffic cop. Let the parkway police boys worry. He, nevertheless, noted the numbers on the Jaguar’s license plate.

  Miller was patient. He had been patient for upward of an hour. He was also reasonable—noticeably, carefully reasonable. He said, all right, if Mr. Hayward insisted, perhaps it had not been done to keep Mrs. Piermont from identifying the girl. He said perhaps they could think of a better reason. He said, suppose they started it from the dress. Suppose they put it this way—

  John had not counted on the green dress. He’d got the labels off the other things. He had seen that the label already was off the green dress. “So did we,” Miller said. “So that was one we couldn’t check ourselves.” He had not counted on Barbara Phillips’s recognition of the green dress. Once she had remembered it, he had, of course, to play along. Play along to the shop in Danbury.

  “I take it,” John said, “you had us followed.”

  What, Miller wondered, did Mr. Hayward think they would do? Followed, and checked back on.

  So, John and “this Phillips girl—bright girl it seems like she is”—had moved along to the Piermont house, and Mr. Hayward had put on a pretty good show. It hadn’t happened, apparently, that he had previously bumped into this Eba—Ebenezer Titus. “Funny names people have in the country,” Miller said. Anyway—

  Mr. Hayward hadn’t expected it to get that far. The whole point was it wasn’t to get that far—that Nora Evans was to stay unidentified. He ought to have known that, by and large, people don’t. But Mr. Hayward couldn’t be expected to know that. When he and Miss Phillips got as far as the Piermont house, even if they didn’t see Mrs. Piermont, the idea of keeping the girl’s identity secret had to be given up.

  “That’s the way it was, wasn’t it, Mr. Hayward?”

  “No,” John said. “I’d never heard of Mrs. Piermont. Of—any of it.”

  “Never heard of her,” Grady said. “Never heard of Nora Evans.” He shook his head. “Seems like he don’t get around much,” Grady said to Miller.

  Grady really hates me, Hayward thought. He’s out to get me. With Miller it isn’t personal, but he’s out to get me too.

  Miller was, he said, just trying to get things straight—trying to get the whole picture. The original plan was that nobody would ever get as far as the Piermont angle. Once they had, something had to be done about it. Miller would say for Mr. Hayward that he didn’t give up easily. Of course, he could see Mr. Hayward’s point. Identification of the girl wouldn’t matter too much—maybe it wouldn’t—if he could avoid a tie-in.

  “So,” Miller said, “you drive back to town and take Miss Phillips home. Then you drive back up to the country. To the Piermont place. You think the old lady is still in Florida. But, because this man Titus is around, you take a gun. Just on the chance you might need it. I don’t say you went up there to kill anybody.”

  “That,” John said, “is damn’ nice of you.”

  There was no point in playing along, or pretending to play along. Miller did not appear to hear him.

  “Before that, you’ve gone back to your place and gone up the stairs, so as not to let this elevator man see you. You get this jacket and—”

  “Why?” John said. “Why would I want to wear the jacket?”

  “We’ve wondered about that,” Miller said. “Why did you? Didn’t want to get your good clothes messed up, maybe? Or—because at night the jacket would show up dark? Not like the light suit you’d been wearing?”

  “It’s your story,” John said. “None of it happened.”

  A squarely built man in civilian clothes came into the room. He nodded to Miller and Grady, and to the State Police sergeant. He sat down and listened.

  “Oh,” Miller said, “it happened, all right.” He went on with it. John had gone back down the stairs in his apartment house, now wearing the jacket, which would show dark at night, and, Miller supposed, dark slacks. He had driven to the Piermont place, found it dark, and got in—through a window; they had found the window—and started looking for what he had to find. Still not meaning to kill anybody, but with a gun along if he had to. Thinking the old lady was still in Florida. But the old lady wasn’t. She heard him, and came downstairs.

  “So,” Miller said, “you used the gun. Why? Whyn’t you just run?”

  “You tell it,” John said. “Maybe I just like to kill people.”

  “Tough guy,” Grady said. “First a smart cooky. Now a tough guy.”

  Then, Miller said, still ignoring what Grady said, Mr. Hayward had run for it. Maybe he had seen Titus’s light go on, in the room over the garage. Maybe, knowing somebody would come at the sound of the shot, he had merely run. He had come to a barbed-wire fence, and gone under it—and snagged the jacket. Wasn’t that how it had happened? What was the point of denying it had happened that way?

  “I don’t know there’s any point,” John said. “But nothing like that happened. Somebody else owns the jacket—apparently wore it last night. Probably shot Mrs. Piermont. Put the jacket back in my place where you people found it this morning. It wasn’t there when I left. Maybe whoever’s doing this was waiting to see me leave and—”

  “Oh God,” Grady said. “Here we go again.”

  “You see what Grady means, Mr. Hayward,” Miller said. “You see how it looks.”

  “All right,” John said. “Why don’t you charge me with it? You seem to think you have enough. I suppose you know what I was looking for? In the Piermont house?”

  “Why sure,” Miller said. “Sure we do. Something ties the whole picture together. Just a picture of you, Mr. Hayward. Just the picture Julie Titus sent back to the old lady, saying this was her new husband. Show him, Grady.”

  Grady showed him the photograph. It was a smaller print of the picture which had been in the Eleventh Street apartment. You could hardly make out the tree in the smaller print.

  “So you killed the old lady for nothing,” Miller said. “Yesterday afternoon, she gave the photograph to Shapiro. Told about how she got it in a letter from the girl—letter in which the girl said she was married and that this was a picture of her husband. So you went to all the trouble of killing her for nothing at all.”

  (Everywhere you turned, the hole was stopped. Always, the adversary had been before him. For minutes, while they watched him, John looked only, through darkness, at the top of a wooden table—seeing nothing, his mind dulled as if, repeatedly, but never quite crushingly, he had been subjected to numbing physical blows.)

  “I don’t suppose,” Miller said, finally, “that you argue the picture isn’t a picture of you? Or, that the old lady lied about how she got it? Of course, she’s dead. But she told Shapiro. Or, maybe you think Shapiro lied? Maybe you think we’re all lying.”

  John shook his head, slowly.

  “The lie’s bigger than that,” he said. “It goes back further than that.”

  “Maybe,” Grady said, “you got a twin brother you haven’t told us about? Maybe he was shacking up with the girl? Maybe he was the one killed her?”

  “Now,” Miller said, “there’s an idea for you, Mr. Hayward. Just come up with a twin brother.”

  The squarely built man got up and walked out. He had been, apparently, only a visitor. John was vaguely conscious that he had left. John sat shaking his head slowly. They didn’t expect an answer.

  “You see,” Miller said, “the girl sent this picture of the man she called her husband. So you can’t argue, as maybe you could about the one in the apartment, that somebody else put it there—that it wasn’t there when she was alive. See what I mean? This one, she sent. You want to say the man was somebody else, and that this girl—this girl who was living with him—couldn’t tell the difference? Or—or what?”

  “Maybe,” Grady said, �
�she was in it right along. She and this guy work the whole thing out, so that she gets killed and it looks like Mr. Hayward killed her. How’s that, Mr. Hayward? You like that one?”

  John listened dully. (Everywhere you turned, the hole was stopped.) He put clenched fists to his forehead, and pressed hard. He tried to make himself think; tried to force consecutive thought into his swirling mind. And then—

  “It could have been this way,” John said. “This man offers to mail the letter. He goes out with it, and opens it, and takes out the picture she’d put in—the picture of him—and puts in this one of me. Addresses a new envelope and mails it.”

  His mind was suddenly entirely clear.

  “Well, Mr. Grady,” John Hayward said, “you like that one?”

  Once more, Grady used his monosyllabic epithet. But Miller’s eyes narrowed a little.

  John looked at Miller’s left hand.

  “Doesn’t your wife ever give you letters to mail?” John said.

  “Oh,” Miller said, “I don’t say it isn’t possible.”

  Grady made a noise. Miller did not look at him.

  There was a sound at the door, and Miller looked that way. The square man who had left the room a few minutes before, stood in the doorway, and made a movement of his head. Miller got up and went to the door and the squarely built man said something. Miller beckoned Grady, then, and they both went out of the room, closing the door after them. The State Police sergeant, who remained in the room, went over and looked out a window. He said, “We need rain. My peas are drying up.” He did not seem to expect an answer; getting none, he continued to look out the window at the spring afternoon.

  For what seemed a long time, then, nothing happened—the sergeant continued to look out the window; John Hayward continued to look at the table top. Minutes passed, and the door opened and Grady came in. He looked at John with animus, and walked over and stood beside the trooper and looked out. Then the door opened again and Miller came through it. And Barbara was with him. For John, a kind of brightness came into the room with her.