Bruno stared at him. Gerard had just implied that if it was an inside job, Bruno and his mother must have had something to do with it, and it certainly was an inside job. Gerard knew that he and his mother had decided only Thursday afternoon to leave Friday. The idea of getting him all the way down here in Wall Street to tell him that! Gerard didn’t have anything, and he couldn’t fool him by pretending that he had. It was another perfect murder.
“Mind if I shove off?” Bruno asked. Gerard was fooling around with papers on his desk as if he had something else to keep him here for.
“In a minute. Have a drink.” Gerard nodded toward the bottle of bourbon on the shelf across the office.
“No, thanks.” Bruno was dying for a drink, but not from Gerard.
“How’s your mother?”
“You asked me that.” His mother wasn’t well, wasn’t sleeping, and that was the main reason he wanted to get home. A hot resentment came over him again at Gerard’s friend-of-the-family attitude. A friend of his father’s maybe! “By the way, we’re not hiring you for this, you know.”
Gerard looked up with a smile on his round, faintly pink-and-purple mottled face. “I’d work on this case for nothing, Charles. That’s how interesting I think it is.” He lighted another of the cigars that were shaped something like his fat fingers, and Bruno noticed once more, with disgust, the gravy stains on the lapels of his fuzzy, light-brown suit and the ghastly marble-patterned tie. Every single thing about Gerard annoyed Bruno. His slow speech annoyed him. Memories of the only other times he had seen Gerard, with his father, annoyed him. Arthur Gerard didn’t even look like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detective. In spite of his record, Bruno found it impossible to believe that Gerard was a top-notch detective. “Your father was a very fine man, Charles. A pity you didn’t know him better.”
“I knew him well,” said Bruno.
Gerard’s small, speckled tan eyes looked at him gravely. “I think he knew you better than you knew him. He left me several letters concerning you, your character, what he hoped to make of you.”
“He didn’t know me at all.” Bruno reached for a cigarette. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this. It’s beside the point and it’s morbid.” He sat down coolly.
“You hated your father, didn’t you?”
“He hated me.”
“But he didn’t. That’s where you didn’t know him.”
Bruno pushed his hand off the chair arm and it squeaked with sweat. “Are we getting anywhere or what’re you keeping me here for? My mother’s not feeling well and I want to get home.”
“I hope she’ll be feeling better soon, because I want to ask her some questions. Maybe tomorrow.”
Heat rose up the sides of Bruno’s neck. The next few weeks would be terrible on his mother, and Gerard would make it worse because he was an enemy of both of them. Bruno stood up and tossed his raincoat over one arm.
“Now I want you to try to think once more,” Gerard wagged a finger at him as casually as if he still sat in the chair, “just where you went and whom you saw Thursday night. You left your mother and Mr. Templeton and Mr. Russo in front of the Blue Angel at 2:45 that morning. Where did you go?”
“Hamburger Hearth,” Bruno sighed.
“Didn’t see anyone you knew there?”
“Who should I know there, the cat?”
“Then where’d you go?” Gerard checked on his notes.
“Clarke’s on Third Avenue.”
“See anyone there?”
“Sure, the bartender.”
“The bartender said he didn’t see you,” Gerard smiled.
Bruno frowned. Gerard hadn’t said that a half an hour ago. “So what? The place was crowded. Maybe I didn’t see the bartender either.”
“All the barmen know you in there. They said you weren’t in Thursday night. Furthermore, the place wasn’t crowded. Thursday night? Three or 3:30?—I’m just trying to help you remember, Charles.”
Bruno compressed his lips in exasperation. “Maybe I wasn’t in Clarke’s. I usually go over for a nightcap, but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I went straight home, I don’t know. What about all the people my mother and I talked to Friday morning? We called up a lot of people to say good-by.”
“Oh, we’re covering those. But seriously, Charles—” Gerard leaned back, crossed a stubby leg, and concentrated on puffing his cigar to life—“you wouldn’t leave your mother and her friends just to get a hamburger and go straight home by yourself, would you?”
“Maybe. Maybe it sobered me up.”
“Why’re you so vague?” Gerard’s Iowan accent made his “r” a snarl.
“So what if I’m vague? I’ve got a right to be vague if I was tight!”
“The point is—and of course it doesn’t matter whether you were at Clarke’s or some other place—who you ran into and told you were leaving for Maine the next day. You must think yourself it’s funny your father was killed the night of the same day you left.”
“I didn’t see anyone. I invite you to check up on everyone I know and ask them.”
“You just wandered around by yourself until after 5 in the morning.”
“Who said I got home after 5?”
“Herbert. Herbert said so yesterday.”
Bruno sighed. “Why didn’t he remember all that Saturday?”
“Well, as I say, that’s how the memory works. Gone—and then it comes. Yours’ll come, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be around. Yes, you can go now, Charles.” Gerard made a careless gesture.
Bruno lingered a moment, trying to think of something to say, and not being able to, went out and tried to slam the door but the air pressure retarded it. He walked back through the shabby, depressing corridor of the Confidential Detective Bureau, where the typewriter that had been pecking thoughtfully throughout the interview came louder—“We,” Gerard was always saying, and here they all were, grubbing away back of the doors—nodded good-by to Miss Graham, the receptionist-secretary who had expressed her sympathies to him an hour ago when he had come in. How gaily he had come in an hour ago, determined not to let Gerard rile him, and now—He could never control his temper when Gerard made cracks about him and his mother, and he might as well admit it. So what? So what did they have on him? So what clues did they have on the murderer? Wrong ones.
Guy! Bruno smiled going down in the elevator. Not once had Guy crossed his mind in Gerard’s office! Not one flicker even when Gerard had hammered at him about where he went Thursday night! Guy! Guy and himself! Who else was like them? Who else was their equal? He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy’s hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them. He remembered a poem he had read once that said something of what he meant. He thought he still had it in a pocket of his address case. He hurried into a bar off Wall Street, ordered a drink, and pulled the tiny paper out of the address-book pocket. It was torn out of a poetry book he had had in college.
THE LEADEN-EYED
by Vachel Lindsay
Let not young souls be
smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully
flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its
babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve
so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they
seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no
gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they
die like sheep.
He and Guy were not leaden-eyed. He and Guy would not die like sheep now. He and Guy would reap. He would give Guy money, too, if he would take it.
twenty-six
At about the same time the next day, Bruno
was sitting in a beach chair on the terrace of his house in Great Neck, in a mood of complaisance and halcyon content quite new and pleasant to him. Gerard had been prowling around that morning, but Bruno had been very calm and courteous, had seen that he and his little stooge got some lunch, and now Gerard was gone and he felt very proud of his behavior. He must never let Gerard get him down again like yesterday, because that was the way to get rattled and make mistakes. Gerard, of course, was the dumb one. If he’d just been nicer yesterday, he might have cooperated. Cooperated? Bruno laughed out loud. What did he mean cooperated? What was he doing, kidding himself?
Overhead a bird kept singing, “Tweedledee?” and answering itself, “Tweedledum!” Bruno cocked his head. His mother would know what kind of a bird it was. He gazed off at the russet-tinged lawn, the white plaster wall, the dogwoods that were beginning to bud. This afternoon, he found himself quite interested in nature. This afternoon, a check had arrived for twenty thousand for his mother. There would be a lot more when the insurance people stopped yapping and the lawyers got all the red tape cut. At lunch, he and his mother had talked about going to Capri, talked sketchily, but he knew they would go. And tonight, they were going out to dinner for the first time, at a little intime place that was their favorite restaurant, off the highway not far from Great Neck. No wonder he hadn’t liked nature before. Now that he owned the grass and the trees, it meant something.
Casually, he turned the pages of the address book in his lap. He had found it this morning, couldn’t remember if he had had it with him in Santa Fe or not, and wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything about Guy in it before Gerard found it. There certainly were a lot of people he wanted to look up again, now that he had the wherewithal. An idea came to him, and he took a pencil from his pocket. Under the P’s he wrote:
Tommy Pandini
232 W. 76 Street
and under the S’s:
“Slitch”
Life Guard Station
Hell Gate Bridge
Give Gerard a few mysterious people to look up.
Dan 8:15 Hotel Astor, he found in the memos at the back of the book. He didn’t even remember Dan. Get $ from Capt. by June 1. The next page sent a little chill down him: Item for Guy $25. He tore the perforated page out. That Santa Fe belt for Guy. Why had he even put it down? In some dull moment—
Gerard’s big black car purred into the driveway.
Bruno forced himself to sit there and finish checking the memos. Then he slipped the address book in his pocket, and poked the torn-out page into his mouth.
Gerard strolled onto the flagstones with a cigar in his mouth and his arms hanging.
“Anything new?” Bruno asked.
“Few things.” Gerard let his eyes sweep from the corner of the house diagonally across the lawn to the plaster wall, as though he reappraised the distance the murderer had run.
Bruno’s jaw moved casually on the little wad of paper, as if he chewed gum. “Such as what?” he asked. Past Gerard’s shoulder, he saw his little stooge sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, staring at them fixedly from under a gray hatbrim. Of all the sinister-looking guys, Bruno thought.
“Such as the fact the murderer didn’t cut back to town. He kept going in this general direction.” Gerard gestured like a country-store proprietor pointing out a road, bringing his whole arm down. “Cut through those woods over there and must have had a pretty rough time. We found these.”
Bruno got up and looked at a piece of the purple gloves and a shred of dark blue material, like Guy’s overcoat. “Gosh. You sure they’re off the murderer?”
“Reasonably sure. One’s off an overcoat. The other—probably a glove.”
“Or a muffler.”
“No, there’s a little seam.” Gerard poked it with a fat freckled forefinger.
“Pretty fancy gloves.”
“Ladies’ gloves.” Gerard looked up with a twinkle.
Bruno gave an amused smirk, and stopped contritely.
“I first thought he was a professional killer,” Gerard said with a sigh. “He certainly knew the house. But I don’t think a professional killer would have lost his head and tried to get through those woods at the point he did.”
“Hm-m,” said Bruno with interest.
“He knew the right road to take, too. The right road was only ten yards away.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because this whole thing was carefully planned, Charles. The broken lock on the back door, the milk crate out there by the wall—”
Bruno was silent. Herbert had told Gerard that he, Bruno, broke the lock. Herbert had probably also told him he put the milk crate there.
“Purple gloves!” Gerard chuckled, as gaily as Bruno had ever heard him chuckle. “What does the color matter as long as they keep fingerprints off things, eh?”
“Yeah,” Bruno said.
Gerard entered the house through the terrace door.
Bruno followed him after a moment. Gerard went back to the kitchen, and Bruno climbed the stairs. He tossed the address book on his bed, then went down the hall. The open door of his father’s room gave him a funny feeling, as if he were just realizing his father were dead. It was the door’s hanging open that made him feel it, he thought, like a shirttail hanging out, like a guard let down, that never would have been if the Captain were alive. Bruno frowned, then went and closed the door quickly on the carpet scuffled by detectives’ feet, by Guy’s feet, on the desk with the looted pigeonholes and the checkbook that lay open as if awaiting his father’s signatures. He opened his mother’s door carefully. She was lying on her bed with the pink satin comforter drawn up to her chin, her head turned toward the inside of the room and her eyes open, as she had lain since Saturday night.
“You didn’t sleep, Mom?”
“No.”
“Gerard’s here again.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t want to be disturbed, I’ll tell him.”
“Darling, don’t be silly.”
Bruno sat down on the bed and bent close to her. “I wish you could sleep, Mom.” She had purple wrinkled shadows under her eyes, and she held her mouth in a way he had never seen before, that drew its corners long and thin.
“Darling, are you sure Sam never mentioned anything to you—never mentioned anyone?”
“Can you imagine him saying anything like that to me?” Bruno wandered about the room. Gerard’s presence in the house irked him. It was Gerard’s manner that was so obnoxious, as if he had something up his sleeve against everyone, even Herbert who he knew had idolized his father, who was saying everything against him short of plain accusation. But Herbert hadn’t seen him measuring the grounds, Bruno knew, or Gerard would have let him know by now. He had wandered all over the grounds, and the house while his mother was sick, and anyone seeing him wouldn’t have known when he was counting his paces or not. He wanted to sound off about Gerard now, but his mother wouldn’t understand. She insisted on their continuing to hire him, because he was supposed to be the best. They were not working together, his mother and he. His mother might say something else to Gerard—like the fact they’d decided only Thursday to leave Friday—of terrible importance and not mention it to him at all!
“You know you’re getting fat, Charley?” his mother said with a smile.
Bruno smiled, too, she sounded so like herself. She was putting on her shower cap at her dressing table now. “Appetite’s not bad,” he said. But his appetite was worse and so was his digestion. He was getting fatter anyway.
Gerard knocked just after his mother had closed the bathroom door.
“She’ll be quite a long time,” Bruno told him.
“Tell her I’ll be in the hall, will you?”
Bruno knocked on the bathroom door and told her, then went down to his own room. He could tell by the position of the address book on his bed that Gerard had found it and looked at it. Slowly Bruno mixed himself a short highball, drank it, then went softly down
the hall and heard Gerard already talking to his mother.
“—didn’t seem in high or low spirits, eh?”
“He’s a very moody boy, you know. I doubt if I’d have noticed,” his mother said.
“Oh—people pick up psychic feelings sometimes. Don’t you agree, Elsie?”
His mother did not answer.
“—too bad, because I’d like more cooperation from him.”
“Do you think he’s withholding anything?”
“I don’t know,” with his disgusting smile, and Bruno could tell from his tone that Gerard expected him to be listening, too. “Do you?”
“Of course, I don’t think he is. What’re you getting at, Arthur?”
She was standing up to him. She wouldn’t think so much of Gerard after this, Bruno thought. He was being dumb again, a dumb Iowan.
“You want me to get at the truth, don’t you, Elsie?” Gerard asked, like a radio detective. “He’s hazy about what he did Thursday night after leaving you. He’s got some pretty shady acquaintances. One might have been a hireling of a business enemy’s of Sam’s, a spy or something like that. And Charles could have mentioned that you and he were leaving the next day—”
“What’re you getting at, Arthur, that Charles knows something about this?”
“Elsie, I wouldn’t be surprised. Would you, really?”
“Damn him!” Bruno murmured. Damn him for saying that to his mother!
“I’ll certainly tell you everything he tells me.”
Bruno drifted toward the stairway. Her submissiveness shocked him. Suppose she began to suspect? Murder was something she wouldn’t be able to take. Hadn’t he realized it in Santa Fe? And if she remembered Guy, remembered that he had talked about him in Los Angeles? If Gerard found Guy in the next two weeks, he might have scratches on him from getting through those woods, or a bruise or a cut that might raise suspicion. Bruno heard Herbert’s soft tread in the downstairs hall, saw him come into view with his mother’s afternoon drink on a tray, and retreated up the stairs again. His heart beat as if he were in a battle, a strange many-sided battle. He hurried back to his own room, took a big drink, then lay down and tried to fall asleep.
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