Gray said, “Did you touch her?”
Eddie shook his head again.
“I started to. But then…I don’t know what happened. I wanted to get away. That was all I could think about. The next thing I knew, I was out in the street, walking around.”
Gray said, “When you were in the apartment, did you hear any noise?”
Eddie hesitated.
“You mean—inside the place? I don’t think so. I could hear myself breathing. I remember that.”
“Well,” Gray said, “there’s a back door to the apartment, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t hear that door open or shut?”
“No,” Eddie said. “But…you mean whoever did it might have been there when I was?”
Gray said, “That’s what I’m wondering. Between the time you rang the bell and used the key, did you hear anything?”
“No, I didn’t. But I wouldn’t have. The carpet’s pretty thick.”
Gray took a switchblade knife out of his pocket; he had borrowed it from Zucker.
“Is this like the knife you had?” he asked.
Eddie didn’t reach for it.
“Is that the…”
“No,” Gray said. “The police have a lot of these; they take them away from boys whenever they find them. Here.”
Eddie reluctantly took the knife.
“Well, it’s like mine,” he said. “Except mine had a smooth handle.” Suddenly he pushed the knife back into Gray’s hand. He drew a long, sobbing breath.
“I’m all mixed up,” he said. “I don’t know…How long are they going to keep me here?”
Gray said, “I don’t know. It depends on a lot of things. But listen to me, Eddie. No matter what happens, you’re going to need some help.”
Eddie said, “But if people think I killed Mrs. Avery—”
“What then?”
Eddie began to shake his head helplessly.
Gray said, “A lot of people are on your side. A lot more will be if we can prove who really did kill Mrs. Avery. Now tell me one more thing. You said when you went into the apartment, she was dead. And you knew that because her eyes were open, and because of the blood. But you don’t remember touching her.”
Eddie nodded.
“Now think back. How was she lying?”
“…On her back. Sort of twisted.”
“And where was the blood?”
Again Eddie put his hand to his side. “Along here.” He traced a line from his left breast along his ribs.
“Anywhere else?”
“Well…I guess so.” Eddie frowned. “I guess so.”
“Can you remember, though?”
Again Eddie’s hand made that tracing motion along his ribs.
Gray said, “There was really a lot of blood around. Not just in one place. Why do you think you saw it just there?”
Eddie said slowly, “The light…I could see it, like a…” His face twisted.
“Yes?” Gray probed gently.
“A snake,” Eddie said in a choked voice. “Wiggling like a snake. It was red and shiny…” He dropped his head into his hands.
“You mean it was moving?”
“Yes. Sort of…running down her side.”
Gray said, “You’re sure the blood was running?”
Eddie didn’t raise his head, but managed to nod.
Gray said calmly, “Blood dries very fast, you know.”
Eddie lifted his stare to Gray’s.
“What?”
“Blood dries fast. The way things look, you must have walked into the apartment only a few minutes after Mrs. Avery was stabbed.”
Eddie’s face paled.
He said thinly, “You mean she was still alive?” He didn’t give Gray a chance to answer. “If I’d called a doctor, I could have saved—”
“No,” Gray said quickly, “nothing could have saved her life, Eddie. I’ve seen the medical reports. You couldn’t have got a doctor there fast enough to have saved her. The knife went into her heart, and that killed her.”
“But the blood was still running!”
“Was it flowing or pumping? I mean—”
“Running. Trickling.”
Gray said, “Her heart had stopped beating. She was dead, Eddie. You couldn’t have saved her.”
“But if I’d got there a few minutes sooner, I might have.”
Gray put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure you could have. But you couldn’t have known what was going to happen. It wasn’t your fault.”
Eddie was silent.
Gray said, “We’ll talk about this some more.”
Eddie was still silent as Gray went out.
22
The door to the Avery apartment opened inward with a solitary creak. Gray reached inside and fumbled for a light switch to the left of the door. After a moment he found it, and the quiet, empty, faintly dusty living room sprang into subdued light before him. Gray went in slowly, closing the door. It was very still in here.
He stood quiet, looking around him, not quite sure yet why he was here at all. His gamble had failed with Avery. He had no proof to connect the man with the deaths of Ann and Blanche. There was little chance he could find any proof now, and if he himself didn’t find it, would anybody? For the nuances of emotion and reaction that to Gray had seemed so clear a demonstration of guilt weren’t things he could ever demonstrate to any other person.
The slight emphasis Tod Avery had thrown on one word when he’d said, “This doesn’t prove I killed her”—how could you produce a thing like that in court as evidence? The fleeting look of contemptuous disbelief on Avery’s face when Gray had said, “We’ve found the knife,” nobody had even seen except Gray.
And yet—there was meaning in it.
Gray looked around the room. Here on the threshold Eddie Udall had stood staring down in a paralysis of shock. There before the fireplace Ann Avery had lain. And the killer? Where had he stood? What had he said and done?
Gray took out of his pocket the switchblade knife he had shown Eddie. He snapped the blade open. He shut his eyes, balanced the knife in his hand, tried to feel as the killer who stood here had felt. Eddie? Was Eddie the real killer, after all?
Avery?
Try it as Avery first, he thought. He stood still and thought very hard. Ann Avery would be standing before him as he came into the apartment, a shocked, hysterical Ann, primed and ready to pour out accusations, threats, confessions, that a man like Avery could not endure to hear…
Gray imagined the feeling of violence rising in him, and the terror as that violence swelled out of control. He could almost hear Ann’s voice raging at him, muffled by the drumming of his own blood in his ears as the killing fury swept upward and brimmed over beyond the point of control.
Gray felt his hand rise with the knife in it. He struck at empty air. He struck at the ghost of Ann.
Then he opened his eyes and stood frowning in the silence and the solitude. A knife. Ann had been killed by a knife. If Eddie were the murderer, then he might have carried the weapon in his pocket. But if Avery were the man…
Where would Avery have got a knife like that?
The chances that he carried one were remote. Gray thought it over. Then he went into the kitchen and began to search. Knives in two of the drawers looked long and thin and sharp enough to serve. But he knew the apartment had been thoroughly searched and examined. Even Avery’s garments had been tested for bloodstains. It was possible the man had used a kitchen knife, washed it thoroughly, and returned it to the drawer. Wait, though—was it possible?
If Eddie’s story was true, then Ann was stabbed only moments before Eddie Udall came into the room. There wouldn’t have been time enough for a careful washing of the weapon. And a bloody knife hidden quickly out of sight would have left stains the police would find.
No, Gray thought, wait. Something wrong about that. It doesn’t add up.
Get at it another way. Try it like this.
He went back into the living room and stood before the fireplace where the body of Ann had fallen. Again he shut his eyes and tried to feel as Tod Avery would have felt, his wife just collapsed at his feet and the sound of the doorbell ringing in his ears.
He remembered the furious, bursting rage that had battered Blanche Udall beyond human recognition. And then the panic, the frantic need to hide all evidence of the crime even from himself…
If the same man did both killings, then how would that desperate panic have spent itself here in this room, with Ann Avery’s blood pumping out onto the carpet and the knife still dripping in the killer’s hand?
I’ve just stabbed her, Gray thought, making himself a panic-stricken man. Now…there goes the doorbell.
Wait. Don’t move. Maybe whoever it is will go away.
No. There’s a key going into the lock.
Whoever it is has a key…he’s coming in!
Gray looked frantically around. How could he get away? The kitchen? Too far. The bedroom? No, the bath. That was nearest, and there was a lock on the door. He could bolt himself in if he had to, long enough to decide what came next.
Gray turned and ran. His feet made no sound on the thick carpet. He let himself imagine the click of the doorknob turning. He had been right—there was no time to reach any point of refuge except the bath.
He dodged into the open door, keeping his feet light on the tiles. He shut the door and shot the bolt, very quietly, very carefully. It made no sound.
He stood there waiting. He listened to the noises Eddie Udall would have made, crossing the floor, seeing the body.
Now what?
Gray glanced around with quick, desperate looks. For an instant he caught sight of his own face in the mirror, and it was the white, haggard face of Tod Avery. The dizzying illusion held just long enough to startle him, so strong that all of Avery’s horrified, mindless panic flooded through Gray in an overwhelming wave.
The knife! Put it out of sight! Hide it! Quick, before they find me! Hide it, hide it!
If it’s on you when they arrest you, then you’re done for. Get rid of it fast!…No, that’s narcotics, not the knife…But it’s true about the knife, too. Hide it!
Gray looked down at the switchblade knife he still carried in his hand. He saw it not as it was, but red to the hilt with the blood of Ann. His own heart was thudding with the panic of the part he played. He was Avery, with Avery’s terrible need to cleanse himself of guilt by hiding this witness even from himself.
As Avery must have pushed Blanche Udall’s still-breathing body frantically into the sea…Anything, anything to rid his own sight of the evidence of his crime.
But how? Where could he put the knife?
Gray drew a deep breath and let the imagined panic die out of him. Now he had to search.
He knelt to probe behind the toilet bowl, under the wash basin. But no, that was futile. The police had searched the whole place more thoroughly than he could hope to do.
And there was that look of contemptuous disbelief on Avery’s face. The same contempt Avery had shown when Gray had made his suggestion about Ann and Eddie.
A contempt that said, “You’re lying clumsily and I know it. You’re a fool to think you could deceive me. I know what you say is impossible…”
How could Avery know the knife hadn’t been found? Not Eddie’s switchblade, but the knife that killed Ann Avery. How could he think he knew?
Gray tried again. Inside the medicine cabinet, was there anything? Only the razor-blade slot. Shaking his head, Gray tried it. No. The blade slid through easily enough, but the haft stopped it. He shut the door again and looked hopelessly around the room.
Nothing.
Maybe his whole theory was wrong. He unlocked the door, opened it, and went slowly back into the living room. He stood in the middle of the carpet and revolved step by step, taking in the room piecemeal. The sofa, the coffee table, the writing desk, the chair with the lamp table beside it, another chair, another table.
The police had searched everywhere. And yet it was impossible for Gray to believe that Avery had carried that bloodstained knife with him any farther or any longer than he had to. Psychologically, he would have been devoured by the terrible compulsion to get rid of it as quickly as he could.
But where?
And where had he got the knife to start with? Had he run into the kitchen and searched the drawers for a weapon? No, that didn’t fit. It wasn’t a knife he was looking for, but a weapon. Any weapon. And he would have snatched up the first weapon his eye fell on as soon as his rage burst loose.
What kind of weapon?
Gray thought, what is a knife? A sharp blade with a haft to grip it by. He looked down at the switchblade knife and pushed the blade in and out of the handle, listening to the soft click it made. He stared at the closed knife.
Is it a knife now? Where’s the blade? Inside the haft.
But I can’t use it as a knife by gripping the haft alone. So is it one? When the blade is hidden in the haft…
But suppose the haft could be hidden in the blade? Is that possible? Because then, of course, with a haft no wider than the blade, the knife would go down that razor-slot without any trouble at all…
But that’s impossible. The haft must be thicker than the blade. Or must it? What kind of knife would have haft and blade in one, flat and thin together?
Gray drew a deep breath. He walked very fast over the carpet to the little writing desk where Ann must have sat down to scribble the last letter of her life.
He lifted the blotter and looked under it. He pulled open the drawers. He found pens and ink, paper, envelopes, stamps, address book. He found several bills still in their opened envelopes, the flaps neatly slit by something sharp…
But nowhere, nowhere at all, could he find the instrument that had slit the envelopes open.
Nowhere in the desk. Nowhere in the room.
Gray stepped back to the fireplace. He stood where the killer must have stood with Ann Avery before him, convulsed with anger. He looked as the killer must have looked, wildly, around the room. A weapon was what he wanted now, any kind of weapon, anything to quiet this screaming woman before him.
In his imagination he saw the flat, sharp, shining thing that lay on the desk across the room. The paper knife that must have killed Ann Avery.
The building superintendent in his bathrobe opened the door to Gray’s ring. A television program babbled thinly from some unseen screen behind him.
Gray said urgently, “Where do the razor-blade disposal slots open out down here?”
The man stared at him.
Gray said, “When you push something down the razor-blade slot, it has to come out somewhere. I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” the superintendent said, having taken it in by now. “But they don’t come out nowhere. They stay inside the wall. Look, mister—”
Gray blinked at him.
“Have you got a telephone?” he said. “Could I use it, please? I want to call the police.”
The cellar rang with the impact of picks on masonry. Brick dust hung thick in the light of a dangling bulb. Zucker and Gray stood watching as far from the flying bits of brick and plaster as they could get.
“Do you remember,” Gray said, “how Avery was shaving when we came that day? And how when he had his used blade ready to throw away, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to push it down the slot while we were watching? He stood there holding it awhile. Then he laid it on the basin. And then, Harry, he picked up the soap and washed his hands.”
Zucker grunted.
“He’d just finished shaving,” Gray said. “But he washed his hands all over again. Do you know any compulsive hand-washers, Harry? It’s a form of mysophobia, an irrational dread of dirt. And sometimes a feeling that if you wash your hands often enough, you can finally wash away the sense of guilt you feel…”
One of the men with the picks said,
“There she comes. Easy, now—”
Zucker stepped forward to take charge, his flashlight ready. But he didn’t have to take charge. The two bricks that had fallen showed them all they needed to know.
Inside the wall, on a heap of rusty blades, a flat brass paper knife lay, furred with dust. It had been stamped or hammered out of metal in one narrow, sharp-edged piece. And half of it was dark with a congealing of old blood.
Zucker’s flashlight caught a gleam from the flat haft. Gray leaned forward. They saw together, in the same quick glance, the set of clear fingerprints on the metal.
23
Zucker’s voice on the phone made the instrument vibrate tinnily in Gray’s ear.
“So that wraps it up,” he said. “Avery signed the confession ten minutes ago.”
“So he cracked,” Gray said.
“Well, it was funny, in a way. It was our finding the knife that seemed to do it. He kept cool the rest of the way, but—”
Gray said, “I think he felt the knife was the symbol of his guilt to him. As long as he could keep that hidden he wouldn’t have to—I don’t know—convict himself, maybe.”
Zucker said grimly, “The State will take care of that.”
Gray sighed. A curious tension that had held him since the finding of the knife suddenly and strangely dissolved.
“Yes,” he said. “A double conviction. Once by the State, once by himself. It would be double jeopardy, I suppose, except it’s in a different jurisdiction.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Zucker demanded.
Gray said in a tired voice, “Never mind.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Zucker said. “You sound as if you’re sorry for the son of a bitch.”
“Sorry?” Gray said. He sighed again. The telephone felt heavy in his hand. “I wish we had a better answer than the land of punishment Tod Avery’s going to get. This is the best we’ve got now. Someday maybe we’ll have a better way to deal with men like him. I hope so.”
“I’m wasting no sympathy on Tod Avery,” Zucker said. “He’s a cold-blooded killer.”
But I was Tod Avery, Gray thought. Last night, for a few minutes, I was Tod Avery, and I knew, I felt what the forces were that drove him to what he had to do.
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