As she crossed to the bar, I said into the phone, “Hello, Trant.”
“Good evening, Mr. Harding.” His voice was as quiet, as friendly as I had remembered it. “There’s been a development in the Lumb case. I thought you might be interested.”
“Yes,” I said.
“We’ve traced the ownership of the gun. It was bought about three weeks before the murder in a Third Avenue hockshop by a woman who signed herself Angelica Roberts, with an address on West Tenth Street.”
From the beginning I had been prepared for that to happen. There wasn’t, I told myself, any reason to worry. But, even so, hearing him actually mention Angelica’s name was a shock and the realization that, if I hadn’t been resourceful, Betsy would have heard it made my hand on the receiver sticky. I glanced across at her. She was still at the bar, mixing my drink.
Trant was saying, “I’ve just been down to Tenth Street. There’s no Angelica Roberts listed as a tenant. Most of the tenants were out and the ones I talked to had never heard of a woman by that name. Probably she gave a phony address.”
“Probably,” I said.
“But I’ll go down and try again tomorrow.” He paused. “I suppose you’ve never heard of her? Angelica Roberts?”
Betsy was crossing back to me with the drink.
“No,” I said “I don’t think I have.”
“Perhaps you’d ask Miss Callingham when you see her. I hardly like to bother them on something like this. But if, by any chance, she knows anything, you could ask her to get in touch with me.”
“Of course,” I said.
Betsy put the drink in my hand.
“I just called,” said Trant, “because I know you and the Callinghams are interested. I thought I’d keep you abreast.”
“Of course,” I said again. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”
He rang off. I put down the receiver, turning my back to the telephone so that Betsy wouldn’t see the damp finger marks.
“What did he want?” she asked.
“It was just to let me know they’d traced the ownership of the gun Jaimie was killed with. Some woman bought it in a hockshop.”
“Some woman? What woman?”
“I don’t know. Some name I never heard of.”
For a moment, the room, Betsy, watching me mildly, her curiosity completely satisfied—everything seemed changed. All the tranquility was gone, or rather it was like a false front insidiously constructed to conceal the danger lurking behind. Nothing had happened, of course. By the blindest chance, it had all turned out all right. But Trant could easily have given the message to Betsy instead of asking for me. He could easily have called Daphne himself instead of deputizing me. And if Betsy or Daphne had heard Angelica’s name…! For the rest of the evening, as I sat with Betsy, the embarrassments of what might have happened and hadn’t were constantly with me. I was back realizing that a plan for safety was not the same as safety itself. If this little disaster had so nearly struck, then there might, at any minute of the night or day, be others.
The period of my smugness was over. From then on, I would be on my guard.
At five o’clock the next day, just as I was getting ready to leave the office, Molly McClintock came in, her face arranged in a mask of mock terror.
“This is it, chum-vice-president!” she said. “The cops. A Lieutenant Trant from Homicide.”
I had forgotten how individual Trant was. As he came in, unobtrusive, quiet, with no kind of flourish whatsoever, he couldn’t possibly have been anyone else. It was that—his “Trantness”—of which I was most conscious, and, of course, the realization that he was the Enemy.
I offered him a chair, but he didn’t sit down. He stood across the desk from me, smiling.
“I’m haunting you, aren’t I?” he said. “I’ve just been down to West Tenth Street again. You’ll be glad to know I’ve had quite a bit more luck.”
His unrevealing eyes—were they gray or blue?—shifted from my face to the walls as if he were looking for more pictures to admire. There weren’t any. I had been moved into Mr. Lambert’s office and hadn’t gotten around to changing anything. All there was on the wall was a moose head which Mr. Lambert had shot in Canada. Trant settled for that, studying it with his cautious, unassuming scrutiny.
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. As blandly as I could, I asked, “You mean you’ve traced this woman?”
Instantly his eyes moved back from the moose to me. “We haven’t found her—yet, Mr. Harding. But we’ve found out enough to be interested in her—very interested.”
“Interested?”
Lieutenant Trant did sit down then. He dropped into the chair opposite me, took a cigarette from a cigarette case and lit it. I’d never remembered seeing him smoke before. There was a kind of ritualistic air about it.
He said, “This time, when I went back to Tenth Street, the woman in the third floor front was home—a Mrs. Schwartz.”
He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at the small cylinder of ash on its end and then looked rather vaguely at the desk. I pushed an ash tray toward him. He put the cigarette down on it and left it there.
“Mrs. Schwartz,” he said, “was very co-operative.”
I told myself that his deliberate movements, his pauses, his trick of saying a simple sentence as if it had enormous hidden significance were all just police devices which he used automatically. There was no reason to believe they had any particular pertinence to me. But, even so, because I felt guilty, they frayed me.
“As I said,” he went on, “Mrs. Schwartz lives on the third floor. There’s only one other apartment on her floor. It belongs to a man who’s in Mexico at the moment. A few months ago, Mrs. Schwartz tells me, about two months, in fact, a woman called Angelica Roberts moved into that apartment. This woman, said Mrs. Schwartz, had a constant male visitor. I asked her if she knew his name. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘his name is Jaimie Lumb.’”
He picked up the cigarette from the ash tray, blinked at it and put it down again. In spite of myself, I felt my old superstitious fear of him returning and with it my old exasperation against Angelica. Did she always have to mess up everything? She had said that the woman in the apartment across the hall had known nothing about her. Did she call it nothing that Mrs. Schwartz had known Jaimie’s name?
“Mrs. Schwartz,” Trant was continuing, “is a widow and, like many widows without anything particular to do, she interests herself in her neighbors. She found Miss Roberts intriguing. Not only was she very attractive, apparently, but she was having an extremely stormy relationship with Mr. Lumb. There were, it seems, constant and rather noisy episodes. But Mrs. Schwartz isn’t one to complain. In fact, all that drama on the third floor brightened things up a lot. It also gave her a chance to play the good neighbor. About a month after Miss Roberts moved in, she got sick with a virus infection. There was no one to take care of her, so Mrs. Schwartz elected herself ministering angel. She took her in food, straightened up, did all that. And, so Miss Roberts wouldn’t have to get out of bed to let her in, it was arranged that Mrs. Schwartz should have a second door-key made. One evening, after Mrs. Schwartz had come in from the movies, she thought she’d run in and see if Miss Roberts needed anything. She ran in—and she ran into Mr. Lumb, very drunk and disorderly, in the process of strangling Miss Roberts in the bedroom.”
His affected, totally unpoliceman-like way of telling the story was something new, and somehow its very flippancy was ominous. As I listened, I felt the saliva of nervousness in my mouth and I cursed Angelica for an irresponsible fool. Why hadn’t she told me the neighbor had been involved to that extent?
Trant was leaning slightly across the desk, smiling, friendly, terrifyingly without guile.
“Mrs. Schwartz’ sudden intrusion apparently quieted Mr. Lumb down and he went away. The next day, when Mrs. Schwartz went in, she saw deep red throttling marks on Miss Roberts’ throat, but Miss Roberts made no comment. What she did do, although she was st
ill sick, was to go out for a couple of hours. Later, when Mrs. Schwartz was fixing her pillows, she found under them—a gun. She said, ‘So that’s what you went out to buy.’ And Miss Roberts said, ‘Yes.’”
The corners of Trant’s mouth were drooping ruefully. “I apologize for the melodrama of this story, Mr. Harding. I’m sure it’s a far cry from the world you and the Callinghams live in. And I’m afraid it gets even more so. Because in a couple of days Mr. Lumb was back as if nothing had happened and the fights, the reconciliations, the whole pattern started again.”
He was looking down at his hands now as if he was wondering whether or not he needed a manicure.
“Mrs. Schwartz hadn’t heard that Mr. Lumb had been killed. When I told her and told her the date, she was at her most illuminating. She distinctly remembered the last time she saw Mr. Lumb at the house. It was three days before the murder. That night, apparently, Mr. Lumb made a big scene, of which Mrs. Schwartz heard part. The gist of the scene was that Mr. Lumb had fallen in love with someone else and was going to marry her and Miss Roberts should consider herself kissed good-by. The someone else, I feel (don’t you?), was Daphne Callingham. Our friend, apparently, was out to better himself.”
He leaned back in his chair, tilting its front legs off the ground, completely relaxed as if he was sure that this story of the “Lower Depths of Manhattan” was just as impersonally, professionally interesting to me as it was to him.
“Mrs. Schwartz wasn’t home on the night of the murder. She was out at her sister’s at Jamaica. But she came back the next day and she swears that Miss Roberts had still been in residence before she left, but that, when she came back, the apartment was vacant and all Miss Roberts’ belongings were gone. Later, she took me into the apartment. And she was right. The whole place had been stripped of anything resembling a clue.”
He tilted the chair legs back onto the carpet with a little thudding sound. “So that’s the picture, Mr. Harding. Miss Roberts owned the gun; Miss Roberts was, to say the least of it, a woman accustomed to violence; Miss Roberts had been jilted—and Miss Roberts disappeared on the night of the murder. It doesn’t look, does it, as if we’ll have to search anywhere else for the murderer?”
I had my anxiety under control now but I could feel it squirming inside me like a maggot. I had never expected this. I had merely imagined Trant finding the name and address, going to West Tenth Street, drawing a blank and keeping an open mind. But now, of course, thanks to Mrs. Schwartz, he couldn’t keep an open mind. It was inevitable that he would assume Angelica was guilty. Why, in heaven’s name, hadn’t Angelica told me about Mrs. Schwartz and prepared me? Now she wasn’t going to be just one of several leads in the case; she had become the Case and Trant would move heaven and earth to find her.
I sat behind the desk, trying to look unconcerned, waiting for the inquisition to begin. I hadn’t the faintest idea what the inquisition would be, but I was so sure of Trant’s omniscience that I was prepared for everything—except what actually happened.
With no warning at all, he got up from the chair and held out his hand.
“Well, that’s it, Mr. Harding. I’ll be running along.”
I took his hand, not believing it could end this way.
“I hope you didn’t mind me barging in. I deliberately came to you rather than to Mr. Callingham because—” his smile was almost a grin—“I imagine you may want to censor the story a bit for your father- and sister-in-law. I don’t think either of them would like it too well if they knew that Mr. Lumb wasn’t quite the fine, cultivated, clean-cut young man they supposed. But at least you can tell them not to worry. It looks as if we have the case cracked. Of course, we’ve got to find this Angelica Roberts. She seems to have disappeared without a trace. But we’ll find her. Tell them that. Tell them not to worry.”
He started for the door. Then he turned, glancing back at me. “Oh, by the way, did you ask Miss Callingham if she’d heard of Angelica Roberts?”
I looked at him, thinking: He is going. He’s really going.
“Yes,” I lied. “I’m afraid the name didn’t mean anything to her.”
“Which isn’t surprising under the circumstances. Okay, Mr. Harding. Thanks a lot.” His eyes shifted up from me to the moose head on the wall. “Who’s that? One of the late vice-presidents?”
With a little wave of the hand, he went out of the office and closed the door behind him. His cigarette, a long column of ash with a red, smoldering end, was still burning on the ash tray.
chapter 14
After he’d gone, I sat at the desk, fighting the jitters. I told myself: It’s all right. He won’t be able to find her. Even Trant can’t possibly trace her to Claxton. But I forced myself to be realistic and racked my brains to figure out any way in which he might get a clue to her whereabouts. He might, of course, in time—if he covered every hotel—trace her to the Wilton. But what if he did? Surely, he would draw a blank there. Then I thought: If he gets to the Wilton, the desk clerk may remember that a Mr. Harding came to see Angelica Roberts. It was like a nightmare where you’re in a building and you see a crack in the wall here, then there, then there, then there… Suddenly I saw my plan, which had seemed so flawlessly designed to save me, as a net which I had woven and which was now inextricably entangling me.
All I could think of to steady myself was to call Paul. He was still at the Fund office. Betsy was still there, too. On the pretense of going over to pick her up, I managed a few moments alone with Paul. It was the right thing to do. When I told him the new developments, he took them with the utmost calm. Trant would never trace Angelica, he said, in a million years. As for the desk clerk at the Wilton, if I got that extreme in finding things to worry about, I’d go out of my mind. I suspected that his calm was merely put on to soothe me, but even so it worked.
Betsy came in while we were still talking.
“Hello,” she said. “What are you two conspiring about?”
“You,” said Paul. “We’re planning to erect a monument to you as the Angel of the Money Bags, but we’re not completely agreed on the site. Bill thinks it should be the stage of the Music Hall. I, on the other hand, feel it should be built, majestically, on the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
He came with Betsy and me to the door, his arms around our shoulders.
“Good night,” he said, “you lovely, grass-rootsy, regular, home-loving, common American couple.”
He’d made it better for me. At least the jitters didn’t come back. But I was still wary, still prepared for anything. Therefore, when, two days later, Trant called me at the office, I at least had my wits about me. His voice was as friendly as ever. I was beginning to hate that bland, unfaltering friendliness.
“Hello, Mr. Harding. You couldn’t come down to the precinct house right away, could you?”
I played with the idea of saying I was tied up, but I knew that was only putting off the evil day.
“Sure,” I said. And then, “Anything happened?”
“Yes,” he said. “Something’s happened, Mr. Harding. I’ll expect you in about half an hour?”
“All right.”
In the taxi going downtown, the jitters were very close. I fought against them. “Something’s happened.” That was all he had said. That didn’t mean the worst. That could mean anything.
I’d never been in a precinct house before. Its bleak severity had a chilling effect. A cop behind a desk sent me upstairs to a large, bare room where a handful of detectives were sitting around, writing reports, reading newspapers, listening to a muted radio. They were all extremely uninterested in me. One of them took me to Trant’s office. Trant wasn’t there. I was told to wait.
The office was hardly an office; it was merely a cubicle cut off from the main room. It had the spare, ascetic quality of a monk’s cell. To my surprise, I saw on the neat desk a copy of my novel. It had been years since I’d thought of myself as a novelist. The sight of the book stirred complicated emotions and, over my
anxiety, I thought with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure: Is he going to ask me to sign it?
Trant came in very soon. He greeted me with the inevitable, unflagging courtesy. From the beginning he had acted as if we had been close chums for years. Now that quiet assumption of intimacy was unnerving in the extreme.
He took the chair behind the desk and, for a moment, just sat there, watching me without saying anything. Then casually he picked up my novel, turned it over so that the back dust cover was exposed, and handed it to me across the desk. As I took it, he said:
“I was always told that authors never read their blurbs, Mr. Harding. Apparently, it’s true.”
If someone—one moment before—had asked me what was on the dust jacket of Heat of Noon, I honestly wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything. But in the instant in which my hand took the book from his, I remembered and, with a sense of disaster too crushing for any reaction of self-preservation, I thought: This is the end.
I looked at the jacket. That it should have come from this! That, of all the things which could have betrayed me, it should have been the novel. There, of course, on the back of the dust cover, was the photograph of Angelica and me, standing, very young and conscious of our importance, under an elm tree on the Claxton campus. I remembered the taking of the photograph as if it had happened five minutes before. It was I who had insisted that Angelica be included. I had been so proud of her. There it was—the photograph. There even was the dolphin ring plainly visible on her finger. And there was the blurb which I had once read with such naïve satisfaction but which I hadn’t thought of in years.
The Man with Two Wives Page 11