by FRANCES
“Something,” Shapiro said, being a reader of newspapers.
“Nothing against Grant,” Pepperill said. “What’s that thing you call it? Guilt by association, eh?”
“Not I,” Shapiro said. “I take it you did know Professor Cutler?”
“Do you? Why?”
There seemed to be no getting along with the man. Shapiro merely shrugged.
“Want to prove Grant was a left-winger, don’t you? Because poor Cutler was.”
“Professor,” Shapiro said, “I don’t want to prove anything. Just find out if Mr. Grant killed a girl. You brought up Professor Cutler, not I. You did know him?”
One of Shapiro’s self-admitted faults is an inclination to wander into blind alleys, which results from a general curiosity about the irrelevant. A man named—what was it? Oh yes—Benjamin Cutler, supposed to have retired precipitately behind the Iron Curtain, had nothing to do with this.
“Slightly,” Pepperill said. “Good man in the field. My field. But—political type. Cross for the family to bear, from what little I heard. Sanctimonious crowd, the rest of the Cutlers. The Grants too, shouldn’t wonder. Got fed up with all of it, I expect Cutler did. Well?”
He did not wait for an answer. He put his eyeglasses on again and went back to the papers on his desk. A sign-off. Also, an end to the irrelevant. One thing more—
“You didn’t know Grant,” Shapiro said. “But I suppose you knew of him.”
“I’m not illiterate,” Pepperill said. “No time to waste on the sort of thing he writes. But, yes. I know who he is.”
“Did you ever hear that he’s a left-winger, like his cousin?”
Pepperill took his glasses off again, and this time looked at Shapiro for some seconds.
“The old witch hunt,” he said. “As I said it was.” He paused. “No,” he said. “Neither one way nor the other.”
Shapiro spent some hours interviewing undergraduates of Dyckman University (Downtown Branch). He talked to them in corridors and in classrooms; he drank coffee with them in the lunchrooms they frequented and ended with a new appreciation of human variety. The undergraduates came in both sexes, all sizes and colors and spoke English with a variety of accents, some of which surprised even Nathan Shapiro, New Yorker born. And some of them were hep, and could not be said to speak English at all.
They lacked even that superficial homogeneity one finds in a university which is campus-locked. These boys and girls came from everywhere and, in the city, lived almost everywhere, from Bronx to Brooklyn. And some commuted from New Jersey and Long Island.
All of which was, in a general way, mildly interesting to Shapiro, who is interested in human variety, as a detective needs to be. He could not, however, convince himself that he got information of specific value or, indeed, was likely to if he continued.
Most of the boys, and more than half the girls, had never heard of Jeanette Larkin alive and a surprisingly large proportion had not read, or heard, that she was dead. A few remembered her as a name—a name in a roll call. Some, and these all girls, had known her to varying degrees, although none professed to have considered her a close friend.
None could remember having seen her with Reginald Grant, either near the university or elsewhere. But—of those who knew her at all, almost everyone knew that she was “dating” Grant and this because she had told them she was.
This fact developed slowly; it was only when, in early afternoon, Shapiro added up in his mind that it assumed any significance, and then he could not he sure what the significance was. Grant was an older man; he was to some degree a celebrity. It was possible—it was indeed probable—that the girl had been boasting, had been establishing status. Some of the girls in whom she confided had, apparently, been themselves surprised at being told so much about another girl of whom they knew so little.
Aside from that, Shapiro could not feel that he had got much. He had been told, by one girl, that Jeanette had been “an awfully intense kid” and, enquiring further, that this “intensity” had primarily revealed itself in Jeanette’s antipathy to nuclear fission. “She actually picketed!” one blond young woman said, swaying blond hair in astonishment. “At the U.N.” Jeanette was also, he learned elsewhere, a member of something called “Students for Academic Freedom.” “Imagine that!” the student—a dark-haired girl and a very pretty one—had demanded of Detective Shapiro.
Shapiro did not find it especially difficult, being himself in favor of academic freedom and opposed to being disintegrated by hydrogen bombs. But he could not see any useful connection between the dead girl’s “intensity” about causes he thought worthy (if probably somewhat hopeless) and her murder. People who have ideas are often disapproved of but seldom, in the United States at any rate, killed for having them. Which is, Shapiro thought, climbing a flight of stairs to the offices of Homicide, Manhattan West, one of the things I like about the United States. It had begun to rain again. He shook water off his hat as he climbed the stair.
He had a copy of the World-Telegram in his pocket and, at his desk, looked at it again. The photograph of Reginald Grant, “Missing Poet,” was on the front page. It had come out fairly well. Already, he did not doubt, telephones were ringing vigorously at Headquarters; polite policemen were saying, “You’re quite positive? This was at—?” and, finally, that someone would come around for the details. Which meant a good deal of work at precinct level and, as sifting continued, probably for Homicide.
His own telephone rang. He said, “Sure, right away,” and went into Lieutenant Stein’s office and said, “No soap. Or damn little,” and told Stein what there was. Stein said, “Suppose she was a commie?” in a tone of only mild interest, and Shapiro said he hadn’t the least idea, and rather doubted that it mattered. He added that nobody he had talked to had suggested Jeanette had been a “commie.”
Stein agreed that it probably didn’t matter. To get back to what might.
“Got a make on the other prints,” he said. “Those on the doorknob. At Peggy Larkin’s apartment.”
Shapiro nodded his head.
“Not positive,” Stein said. “Not really enough to go on. Merely pretty likely. Private op named Donald Hunter. License lifted five years ago. Tried some sort of shakedown. No complaint filed, for some reason, but they took his license anyway. Looking for the chance, at a guess.”
“So now,” Shapiro said, unhappily, “we’ve got somebody else to look for, haven’t we?”
IX
It was ridiculous to go through the wooded area, particularly in broad daylight, and come up—it was to be hoped unseen—behind the house. To do what? Look at the rear of the house, at empty windows; wonder behind which, if any, of the windows a girl was and whether, if there at all, she was prisoner or honored guest? The only sane thing would be to find a telephone, and call the police and tell them that, if he had nothing else to prove a preposterous story, he had a house. A house he Had been locked up in. In a room one flight up they would find his finger—
The hell they would, Reginald Grant had thought, at about the time Detective Nathan Shapiro was being stared at by a curmudgeon. Whoever “they” were, and whatever up to, they knew their way around. Long before now they would have wiped whatever he had touched, or might have touched. There would be no fingerprints left to show to anybody.
Where I am, Reg Grant thought, is almost precisely where I was before, but now with an even more preposterous story to offer and no better means of making it credible. I still need the girl, whether she’s with them or not with them. Get the girl, get her (somehow) to the police and let them question it out of her. Make her tell what she knows, if she knows anything; what she doesn’t know, which is that I’m the man who telephoned her sister, if she’s an honest girl. And if she’s an honest girl, she’s in trouble, and perhaps because of me. That’s part of it, too. And there’s no telephone here, on the sidewalk, next this small and unexpected wilderness, and that, too, is part of it. By the time I find a telephone and the
police arrive, the birds may well have flown again.
Reg looked around—looked up the slope at the inoperative machinery beyond road’s end, back toward the river beyond the quiet street, to his right into the small wilderness—and saw nobody. He climbed a slope and went over a clutter of stones which had once, he thought, been a wall and arrived, un-romantically, in what appeared to be a dump of sorts. There were old tins and broken bottles. He walked through this area carefully and, knowing himself still in sight from the dead-end street, looked at the ground as if in search of something. He was, he realized, acting it out.
And then—with the thought that it was “un-romantic” to come on discarded rubbish, with the realization that he was “acting it out”—Reginald Grant was suddenly enlightened about himself. He was doing it this way, instead of the sane way, because this was the more interesting way to do it—the more exciting way. The rest, the careful reasons—all that is subterfuge, designed to palliate obvious idiocy. I—I, for the love of God—am seeking adventure!
He stopped, behind a tree, to consider, more fully, this somewhat chilling insight. The implications were many and alarming. Most obviously, of course, unexpected immaturity was implied. It was somewhat as if he were a boy, running away to sea. Or, as if, buried and held down, there was deep within him an impulse to write ballads. He shuddered, naturally, at that thought, and pushed it from his mind with an almost physical effort. A man must, at all odds, cling to some modicum of self respect.
Reginald Grant moved deeper into the small wilderness and paused behind another tree.
When I was younger, he thought, much younger, I boxed—but fought, really—in the ring because it was exciting, and for no other reason. Not to prove anything, or to knock the other man down. To enjoy the excitement, and the risks, of combat; to find, for minutes, body at concert pitch, mind tautened to the immediate; not to be sitting in a chair, watching, as I have been doing since—watching, probing my own mind and emotions, picking words up and putting them down again. It was purposeless and entirely physical and, God help me, how much fun it was.
Fun was not the word for this; not for anything which had started with the blood draining from a young girl’s body. This was combat—combat elected and so far engaged in quite badly. But—chosen. Face that, Reginald Grant, Poet in Flight, and get on with it. Save rationalization for others, if a time comes to explain. Do not fog your own mind with it. You are sneaking up to somebody’s kitchen door, through a long un-tended copse, because you want to, and for no other reason in the world. Somebody is to be done in, and you want to be the man to do the doing in.
He stepped into a briar patch and it ended introspection, as briar patches will. By the time he was out of it, he was a man on the stalk. He was also a man growing more than a little chilly. The sun did not reach into the copse—now largely of evergreens—but a cold wind did.
At a guess, he had about two hundred yards to reach the rear of the house. At a guess, they would not be expecting him to come this way or, for that matter, to be coming at all. If they had seen that a cab was following their gray sedan they would, presumably, have tried to shake it off. If they had not seen the cab following, seeing it going back the way it had come would mean nothing. Probably, they would have had other things to do than flatten their noses against windowpanes and observe passing traffic.
As he moved toward the house, he worked diagonally up the slope. It was not the drill to walk up to the back door. Come even with the house at some distance from it, and above it, and reconnoitre. That was the idea. Find out what there was to get into before getting into it.
The slope was considerable and the underbrush, even when not thorned, hampering. It was some time before, looking down between trees, he saw the rear of the house. Between him and it, beside the close-growing evergreens—once, long ago, they must have been planted as a screen—there was an open area which must once have been lawn, and perhaps kitchen garden. It had not, apparently, been mowed for a long time. The grass was high; an earlier frost had turned it brown.
On his left as, peering around a tree, he looked down on this cleared area, there was what must once have been a stable, and was now—probably—a garage. It was detached from the house. The house was even larger than he had thought; two stories, but with dormers in the roof suggesting a third floor of usable space; wider than he had thought. There was a flagged walk hugging the rear of the house; if he had dropped from the window, he would have landed hard on stone, not soft on turf. There was a single door, near the right end of the house, which would open onto the walk. It was closed, now. Locked, probably; kitchen door, probably.
There was no movement, nobody in sight. Reg felt, uneasily, that he was looking at a deserted house—a place abandoned, in which for years no life had gone on, except the scurrying life of mice and rats. Locked up and left for dead, the house looked to be. Then—the right house? Had he, conceivably, passed the house he sought without seeing it?
He moved out where he could look up toward the roof of the house. Square, stubby tower; railing around the tower. Actually, a kind of crow’s nest. At the moment, unoccupied by crow or other.
Looking up, Reg saw another thing. The sky had clouded over. That was why the sun had not reached, even to splatter, through the trees. That was why he had suddenly begun to feel chill in the air, and to miss his abandoned Burberry. (That had been, certainly, a prize bit of asininity. But if he had gone to pick it up, he might have missed the capture—or was it rescue?—of the red-haired filly, and hence, with nobody to follow, not be here at all.)
The door opened, demonstrating that the house was not deserted. Reg went back behind his tree, he hoped quickly enough, and saw a man come out, carrying a pail. Outside the door, the man, who was nobody Reg had seen before—not the tall dark man, who was almost certainly there, or the square man, who probably was on his way by now. This man looked thin; he wore slacks and a gray sweater. Outside the door he stopped and looked around, and then up at the sky. Checking on the weather only, it was to be hoped.
He seemed to be satisfied with what he saw, or did not see. He walked in the tall grass—but now, Reg could see, along a path worn through it—for half a dozen paces. He leaned down and tugged at something, and there was a faint clanking of metal. He emptied the pail, apparently, into a buried receptacle. He stood up and looked around again—Reg was sure that, this time, the tree hid him—and went back along the path and through the door.
All very domestic. Kitchen help empties garbage, having cleaned up the kitchen. Probably the last step in kitchen cleaning up? It was not a subject on which Reg Grant was an authority, but that seemed logical. And, with kitchen taken care of, go about other chores elsewhere? The wish might well be the father, as usual.
Give him a few minutes and chance it. No use hiding here behind a tree, waiting to be rained on. Give the man time, but not too much time—not time enough to finish his other chores and return to the kitchen. Get into the house and get on with it; find the girl and get her out of it. An open space to cross. No way of avoiding the open space? Yes—wait a minute. Work down and around, hidden by trees. Come up near the end of the house. There the trees grew closest. Once at the house, hug its wall until the door was reached. Duck under the ground-floor window between door and end of house. And, then, move fast.
He worked down toward the house, and to his right. The house was almost square; it was this proportion which had made it, when he first saw it through fog, seem so tall—a kind of column of a house.
Between the nearest shielding evergreen and the corner of the house there was still a cleared space of some thirty feet—a space of high grass, which would hamper rapid movement. Get down and crawl through it, on hands and knees? Try, my friend, not to be more inept than need be. Look at windows; make sure no nose is pressed against any. Make a dash—
He bent down a little as he ran. Absurdly, he felt his back muscles harden to repel a bullet. As if they could—
He hugg
ed the side of the house and now, he thought, was out of sight from within it—out of sight unless somebody opened a window and looked straight down. He would hear a window opening. For what good that would do him, if the one who opened it had a gun handy. Get inside and—
Locked? Not locked. The knob turned in his hand. The door opened inward. Slow and cautious or jump for it? He jumped. He started to push the door to, hard, and caught himself, and closed it behind him, gently, almost tenderly, as he looked at the room he had come into.
A kitchen, as he had supposed it would be. A large, square room, cupboards in the walls; a counter on his right, running the length of the room, with a sink in the center of it; two windows over the counter. A window behind him, next the door. Still, a dim room—dim, at any rate, on this dimming day. Range and “fridge” against the left wall. A swinging door beyond it. At the end of the room, two doors, side by side.
Nobody in the room. No use staying in the room. He moved across it toward the twin doors. And one of the doors opened.
The man who came through the doorway, smiling slightly and saying nothing, was the man who had carried the pail out into the back garden—the thin man whose sweater accentuated the narrowness of his shoulders. Wait a mo—not really narrow, seen closer. Sloping shoulders. Where last had he seen shoulders like—?
The man came toward him. A small man, really—a hundred and thirty-five, at a guess; five-seven at a guess. Not especially young—early thirties, at a guess. A man with a small scar above his right eye, in the eyebrow. The sort of scar which comes from an injury one might get by walking into an open door. A slight dent in the nose. No weapon in sight.
And the small man, with no weapon, moved toward Reg Grant—who outweighed him by thirty pounds or more and was at least a head taller—with the air of one who is about to pick up some small object which is in the wrong place and remove it to the right place. He continued to smile and it occurred to Reg, as, involuntarily, he stopped and looked at the man, that the smile was one of contentment, such as might appear on the lips of someone for whom things were working out precisely right, precisely as planned.