“But I didn’t know,” Quentin said. “And the evidence seemed so complete against Eddie. It still does, except for the letter, and even that isn’t proof he couldn’t have killed her.”
“But you don’t think he did, now?”
“I think there’s room for very strong doubt now, at least. Blanche’s death—the odds against there being two different killers involved—” Quentin shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not making sense. I’ve had so much on my mind lately, and now—” He rubbed his eyes wearily.
“Did you see the letter?” he asked Gray.
“Yes,” Gray said.
“What was it about?”
Gray thought carefully. “Among other things,” he said, “she wrote that she was going to make a major change in her life because of a discovery she’d just made. She didn’t say what the discovery was. You knew her well. Do you have any idea what it might have been?”
“If I knew what the major change was I could guess better.”
“My guess would be that it involved you,” Gray said.
“I’d like to think,” Quentin said, “that she had decided to leave her husband and come to me. Marry me, if she could get a divorce. I suppose we’ll never know, now.”
He was looking steadily at the carpet, turning the glass around and around between his hands.
“Why would she make a decision like that?” Gray asked.
“I wish I knew. We didn’t really know each other very well, I suppose. We only met about four months ago, and it wasn’t until lately that we—that things got serious between us. We had so little time together, after all.”
“How did it start?” Gray asked quietly.
“Through Eddie,” Quentin said, still looking at the carpet and speaking almost as if to himself. “That’s what drew us together, at first. We both liked the boy. He was so…so lost. Alone. I knew what that was like. So did Ann.” He sighed. “I’ve had my tenure quite a while now at the school. The only thing I could be fired for is immorality. I knew that. But after a while I realized what I was turning into, how much I was missing, when I balanced material things against…something really important.”
He was quiet, truning the glass around and around with faint tinkling sounds.
Gray said gently, “Was it important for her, too?”
Quentin laughed without humor. “She’d been married to God for sixteen years,” he said bitterly. “Tod Avery’s a—well, a few hundred years ago he’d have been right alongside Cotton Mather, hanging the Salem witches. There’s nothing worse than self-righteousness. Ann had been locked up inside herself ever since she married that—that coldblooded, self-righteous—” He broke off, shrugging.
“Why did she marry him?” Gray asked. “Why did she stay with him?”
“I’m not sure. I told you I never really had a chance to know Ann well. When we were together those few times, we—we didn’t talk about the past. But I think she married him because he had money and she was very young and thought she was being sophisticated. Afterward, it seems to me she felt guilty because she’d cheated him, in a way, not marrying for love. If he gave her money, she must have felt she had to give him loyalty if she couldn’t give him love. I don’t think she ever really understood what love is, until—until…” He let the words trail away.
“What about Eddie?” Gray asked.
“That was how it started. She had always wanted children. She never had any. Eddie was a sort of outlet, I guess. I know how she felt. We were both too much alone. Too afraid to open up. But we felt the same about Eddie. That seemed to—to unlock things. And…then we were in love.”
For the first time Quentin lifted his head and looked at Gray steadily.
“I’m not a young man,” he said. “I was committing adultery with a married woman, a woman a good deal younger than I am. And I’m a school-teacher. That made it worse, somehow. But there wasn’t anything wrong about it at all. I loved Ann. She loved me. I’m glad she finally came to a decision about—us. I know that must have been the decision she meant.”
He glanced around the rich, still room. “I furnished this place for her,” he said. “After we met, after we began to fall in love. I sold some bonds I had and made the place—well, good enough for her. It was worth every penny it cost. I’m glad I did it. We had those few times together and we could have had a lifetime, if—if—”
He set the glass down on the table and got up abruptly, turning his back.
Gray said, “I’ve got a difficult question to ask. But it’s an important one. And pretty personal, too.”
Quentin said tiredly, “I don’t care any more. Ask whatever you want. I’ll answer if I can.”
Gray said, “You tell me Ann Avery had been locked up inside herself—”
“Like me.”
“Yes. And then there was an unlocking. What I want to find out is more about this unlocking of—emotion, would you call it?”
Quentin made a hopeless gesture.
Gray went on, “Was this unlocking, this new flow of emotion, comparatively mild? Or something stronger?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Quentin said.
Gray thought a moment. “I need to know as much as I can find out about what Ann Avery was really like,” he said. “The conditions of her death had to grow out of the conditions of her life. It will help me very much to know the change that her relationship with you created in her. How strong a change it was, whether this unlocking of emotion in her was a genuine unlocking. An easy way to tell is whether or not she was sexually satisfied.”
A little flash of shock crossed Quentin’s face. He stiffened resentfully.
Gray said, “Do you understand why I’m asking this?”
Quentin sought for an answer. “It’s just that it’s so personal. I can’t—” He made a helpless gesture.
“I know,” Gray said. “It’s hard to accept emotionally. Don’t answer if you don’t feel like it.”
After a pause, Quentin shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Gray nodded. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’ve helped a good deal.” He stood up, put out his hand. “Thanks,” he said.
Quentin took his hand rather limply. Gray turned to the door. Just as he reached it, Quentin said in a low voice, “Wait a minute.”
Gray turned back. Quentin walked to the window and stood looking out.
He said, “It was like being young again. More for her than for me. She was…she was a beautiful woman, you know. And there was a great deal of…of passion there. That’s what had been locked up for so long. Her husband never satisfied her. After a while, though, the way it was with us…she was like a young girl. It was a tragedy—all that beauty, that joy, frozen for so many years. It was like the ice maiden coming alive, in a fairy tale. She was sensuous—I mean, I’ve never known a woman who could feel so strongly. And—” Quentin put his hand over his eyes. His voice faltered.
“And then to kill all that…feeling,” he said. “Oh, my God. She—she’s dead. She…”
He put one hand behind him in a quick gesture. Gray understood.
He went very quietly to the door and opened it. He glanced back once as he left, seeing Quentin standing alone in the rich, luxurious emptiness of the room.
Zucker leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, what did you find out?”
“I’m not so sure,” Gray said.
“What were you looking for?”
Gray shook his head. “Impressions, information. Foundations for more guesses, I suppose. I don’t think Quentin killed Ann. That’s my reaction now. I could be wrong. He feels very strongly about her death, but my guess is the feeling is just what it looks like. He could be repressing, but I doubt it. I’ll have to think it over.” He frowned down at the hat in his hands, then shook his head again. “I’m not sure yet,” he said. “Did you find out anything new?”
Zucker grinned contentedly.
“Take a look at this,” he said,
pushing a big, flat cardboard box across the desk. “We found it on a shelf in the Udall woman’s room.”
Gray laid down his hat and opened the box curiously. The box held a miscellany of snapshots, old high-school dance programs, a pressed corsage, a yellowed lace handkerchief. The ragged flotsam of a childhood and an adolescence that seemed infinitely far removed from the Blanche whom Gray had so briefly known.
Zucker said, “Look at this one.” He pulled out a big flat photograph pasted to a gray cardboard backing. Four rows of stiffly posed children faced the camera in front of a school-house door. Under the picture a white-lettered title said, CLINTON SCHOOL, CLASS OF 1934.
Zucker’s thick finger touched a face in the front row. A girl in a checked dress looked out at Gray, her head tilted sidewise a little, her round, childish face under fair bangs confronting the camera confidently. Gray had seen that face twice before—no, three times. He looked closer to be sure. But Blanche Udall had changed surprisingly little in feature. There was no mistaking her, even after twenty years of unhappy maturity.
Gray sighed. “She had a lot to go through between then and now. I’m glad we never know what’s ahead of us.”
Zucker said, “Look at the one next to her.”
A pretty child with dark curls stood beside the fair one. Her eyes were wide-set, and her mouth curved with a happy promise of beauty.
“Ann Avery,” Gray said. He looked down in silence at the two smiling children for whom long, sterile years and death by violence were all that had lain ahead.
Zucker turned the picture over. Scrawled signatures in unformed, childish hands covered the back. The careful signature of Ann Lennox led all the rest.
“Her husband said Ann and Blanche never met,” Zucker said. “Nobody we’ve talked to knew they’d even heard of each other except in the last six months. But once they must have been very close friends. They stood together to get their class picture taken. Ann signed Blanche’s picture before anyone else did. If I remember school days, you had to be pretty close friends to do that.”
“Then what happened?” Gray said. “Maybe their families moved apart and they never met again. Maybe they really forgot about each other.”
“Look at these,” Zucker said, shuffling over five or six snapshots on the top of the pile. Gray took them up one by one. No, the two girls hadn’t moved apart. Here were Blanche and Ann in bathing suits over slim, immature bodies, smiling on a sunny beach. Blanche and Ann older, in long party dresses, holding diplomas. Blanche and Ann with a group of other teen-agers around a picnic table with redwoods in the background. Blanche and Ann on a park bench with two boys in uniform bending over the back of the bench and smiling into the camera.
Gray looked up. “Is this all?”
“That’s it. We’ve been through the whole bunch.”
Gray considered the park-bench photograph. “They must have been about—let’s see—in their late teens here. Say 1940.” He looked at the tight, short skirts, the exaggerated shoulders of their dresses, the hair upswept into high masses of curls. “The draft started in 1940 as I remember,” Gray said. “I wonder who the soldiers are.”
“Look at the one on the right,” Zucker said. “Remind you of anybody?”
Gray looked. There was something faintly familiar about the boy’s solid features, his stiff, dark hair growing low.
Gray said wonderingly, “Eddie? Eddie Udall?”
Zucker said, “That’s what I thought, too. But I suppose we’ll never know, now.”
Gray turned the snapshot over. There was no writing on the back to identify the smiling quartet on the park bench.
“Eddie was born in 1940,” Gray said. “The time would be right, I suppose. It figures. A wartime love affair and the boy shipping out before he even knew.” He looked at the plump blond face under the too-massive curls. “Blanche was pretty in those days. She must have gone downhill fast once she got started. Maybe this was the start. An illegitimate baby would be a heavy handicap for a girl that age, just starting out to earn her living. What do we know about her family?”
“Nothing yet. We’re still checking.”
Gray turned the snapshots over in the remaining pile. “Any pictures of Eddie?” he asked.
Zucker said, “Nothing at all.”
Gray looked up, puzzled. “Something funny here, isn’t there? She didn’t have to keep the kid with her all these years. If she cared that much about him, there ought to be baby pictures at least.”
“A lot about Blanche doesn’t add up yet,” Zucker said.
Gray gazed into space thoughtfully.
“Well, she and Ann grew up together,” he said. “At some point they must have had a quarrel, or—well, I don’t know. Sometime soon after this last picture was taken they probably separated. Weren’t Ann and Avery married around this time? Maybe that was it—Avery wouldn’t let Ann associate with a fallen woman. Still, why deny Ann ever even knew Blanche? That’s carrying virtue too far.”
“It’s funny,” Zucker said, “that with everybody wondering what it was Ann saw in Eddie Udall, nobody’s ever mentioned he was the son of her old friend. Not even Eddie himself seemed to know his mother and Ann Avery were close friends for just about half their lives.”
“There’s got to be a reason,” Gray said. “We don’t know enough yet, but the reason’s there somewhere.” He shut his eyes for a moment, thinking. “Stella,” he said. “Stella knows something. I’ve got to talk to Stella.”
Zucker looked doubtful. “A hopped-up kid,” he said. “She’d tell you anything that came into her head.”
“She said she heard Blanche and Ann fighting,” Gray said. “I don’t even know she meant Ann Avery, but the chances are she did. I’ve got to find Stella somehow.”
“We’re looking for her now,” Zucker reminded him. “She and Witczak were the two kids our witness saw leaving the Avery apartment the night of the murder. We got an identification. Sooner or later we’ll find them.”
“That’s not fast enough for me,” Gray said, getting up. “I’ll see what I can do.”
17
Gray had been asleep for half an hour when the telephone rang. He swore under his breath as he lifted the receiver.
“Mr. Gray?” Matt Witczak’s voice asked.
Instantly Gray was wide awake.
“Speaking. How are you, Matt?”
“I got something to tell you,” Witczak said. “You feel like taking a chance?”
“I think so. Why?”
“I hear you been asking around, trying to find me. Okay, you want to talk to me, why not? Only I got to be careful. You know where Lebanon Drive is, in the Park?”
“I know where it is.”
“If you’re there in half an hour, maybe I’ll show up. You park a ways up Lebanon, after it turns off the main road—not too far. Then you light a cigarette and that’s it. You with me?”
“Yes,” Gray said, “but I wish you’d tell me—”
Witczak’s voice suddenly held desperation.
“I’m on the run. The cops are looking for me, remember? But I got something I want to say. If I don’t change my mind before you show up.”
“Listen, Matt—”
There was a click. The line was empty.
Gray’s car rolled smoothly along a dark, winding road in Golden Gate Park. He glanced at his wristwatch, holding it so the light from the dashboard illuminated the dial. Eleven o’clock. He was feeling tense and uneasy. He had instructions to follow, rather theatrical instructions, and quite possibly he was doing a foolish thing. But it seemed to Gray that time was running out. He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. This was a risk worth running, if he got the answer out of it that he hoped for.
He turned left, drove a hundred feet farther, and then pulled up to the side of the road. He switched off his headlights, lit a cigarette, and waited.
He waited nearly fifteen minutes, long enough to begin wondering if his careful inquiries in Witczak’s neighborhood and
all the elaborate plans for a meeting tonight had been nothing but a joke at his own expense. It could easily be that.
Then the door handle clicked. The door opened, and a dark figure slid gently into the front seat beside Gray. Matt Witczak’s pale, alert face turned toward him. The boy’s low voice said, “Take it easy, cat. I got friends pretty close.”
Gray said, “I came alone.”
“Just stay put.”
Witczak reached for the dashboard compartment. He opened it, rummaged inside. “You got a gun on you?” he asked.
“No.”
“I want to make sure.”
Deft hands patted Gray’s coat.
“No gun,” Witczak said finally. “You’re not so smart. Or maybe you trust me a lot.”
“No more than I have to,” Gray said. Witczak looked gratified.
“You didn’t tell the cops about this?” he asked. “You’re crazy. A guy could get mugged in the park easy. It happens all the time. My boys are right back in the bushes there. Don’t you know enough not to fall for gags like this?”
“It doesn’t look like it, does it?”
“You think I’m soft?” Witczak demanded.
“Nobody gets hard all the way through,” Gray said. “You’ve had to do a lot of fighting. No, you’re not very soft.”
Witczak grunted. “The cops are looking for me, aren’t they?” he said.
“They are now. Do you know you and Stella were seen leaving the Avery apartment the night Ann Avery was killed?”
Witczak sat perfectly motionless, saying nothing, frozen into sudden wariness like a startled animal. Then, cautiously, he said, “It wasn’t us. We got witnesses.”
“All right,” Gray said. “I wanted you to know.”
Witczak said nothing. Gray let him meditate awhile. Then he said, “You heard about Blanche Udall, I suppose.”
Witczak glanced sidewise at him. “Yeah.”
“I saw her the night she was killed,” Gray went on. “She came to my office, late. She wanted money. I tried to get her to go to a hospital or let me call a doctor. She was in bad trouble. The monkey was riding her so hard she didn’t know what she was doing.”
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