Shadow of Guilt

by Patrick Quentin

“Of course.”

  “Make some excuse for Mrs. Lord and everybody. Don’t let her know. Don’t let anyone know. Just come home right away. We’ll have to think.”

  I was home in twenty minutes at exactly twenty past three. Connie was waiting for me in the hall. There was no longer any indication of lack of control. She looked even handsomer and more capable than usual. Ala wasn’t there. With incredible frivolity, so it seemed to me, she was having lunch and spending the afternoon with Rosemary Clark. My wife hustled me into the library. She hurried to her desk, picked up a neatly folded newspaper and brought it to me, making me read the paragraph.

  “Don’t you see?” Her gray level gaze was fixed on my face with her overbearing “committee” look. “The police are bound to know he was an—an acquaintance of ours. But that’s not all. What about those people in Massachusetts? The Greens? What’s to stop them calling the police and letting them know Ala and Don were there for Friday night?”

  There was, of course, nothing to stop the Greens. It seemed inconceivable that I hadn’t prepared myself for that.

  “So,” said Connie, “there’s only one thing to do. He’s dead. It doesn’t matter who killed him. Anyone might want to kill a man like that. It’s nothing to do with us. But we’ve got to think out a story and stick to it—you, me and Ala. We’ve absolutely got to. If it all came out about Ala, it could ruin her whole life.”

  As I looked at my wife, I thought how invariably I got her wrong. Connie wasn’t going to be civic-minded at all. All that civic-mindedness was reserved for juvenile delinquents, museum directors and slum-property owners. To her this was a family affair. All her clashes and tensions with Ala were forgotten because Ala was a Corliss, even though a pseudo one, and for the Corlisses Connie would fight as relentlessly and unscrupulously as old Charlie Corliss himself.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ve thought it out and I’m sure it’ll be all right. Thank heavens we don’t have to worry about the time he was killed. Sunday, I mean. We both know Ala was here in the house all day. Of course, she was locked in her room most of the time, but we don’t have to tell the police that. We can just say she was here for the whole day, and you and I and Milly Taylor can prove it.”

  “Milly Taylor?” I said. “Was she here?”

  Connie gave a little impatient shrug. “Didn’t I tell you? After you’d gone to Idlewild, I called her. I knew she probably had nothing to do. I invited her for lunch and we did the crossword together. She left only a few minutes before you came back. So that’s settled. There’s just the other tiling—the trip to the Greens’.”

  Just the trip to the Greens’! Nothing more than that! I thought: If only she knew. She went on, making it into a neat little pattern like one of her agenda.

  “Now, this is what I’ve decided. We’ll have to rehearse Ala, of course, when she gets back. But listen, George. We have to admit she and Don went to the Greens’ on Friday. We can’t get out of that. But we can say that she just knew Don slightly, that she met the Greens at some party and the Greens invited them both to Massachusetts. They went but Ala got bored. She asked Don to bring her home. We’ll say Don brought her home Saturday evening and that was the end of everything.” She paused, watching me rather severely. “Why should the police have to know there was this—this crazy infatuation? Or that ridiculous motel episode? What possible need is there? Can’t we do it that way? Isn’t that all right?”

  Although it was taking a terrible chance of being found out later in a lie, it was, I supposed, as all right as anything could be. At least, it would have been except for one thing.

  I said, “What about Chuck? Where was he yesterday? I didn’t tell you, but when Vivien called last night, she said he hadn’t been home at all.”

  “He… Chuck…” Suddenly Connie looked completely different. The skin of her cheeks had gone a grayish-white. “George, are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then where… where was he? What…? George, you don’t think… you can’t…” She took a quick step toward me and grabbed my arm. “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you let me know earlier? I told him to go home. I made him promise. I never for a moment—”

  She broke off abruptly because Mary had come in. She stood by the door, straightening her hideous Corliss maid’s cap on the messy gray bird’s nest of her hair.

  “There’s a gentleman to see you, Miss Connie,” she said. “He says he’s from the police.”

  It had, of course, to happen then. In a way it was more alarming right in the middle of our planning than if he’d arrived before we’d even started. And suppose Ala came home while the policeman was still here. If she barged in unrehearsed! How could I have been such a moron as not to have anticipated this and got some sort of story straight with her?

  Connie and I looked at each other gauntly.

  “What about Ala?” I said.

  “She didn’t say when she’d be back. She might—”

  “Tell him you aren’t in.”

  “Yes.” Connie spun around to Mary. “Tell him I’m not here, Mary. Tell him you don’t know when I’ll be back. Say…”

  She must have heard the footsteps a fraction of a second before I did, for she stopped. We both turned to the library door as a man walked in, a tall, youngish man in a neat gray suit.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “I hope you’ll excuse me for following the maid in like this.”

  He smiled. It was a pleasant—much too pleasant—smile, and his face, composed, with very bright, intelligent eyes, wasn’t like a policeman’s face at all. It was—what? A priest’s face, perhaps? A face which would have gone with one of those quiet, ascetic monks painted by Zurbaran.

  He was looking at Connie. “Mrs. Hadley?”

  “Yes,” said Connie.

  The eyes—were they blue or gray?—turned to me. “And Mr. Hadley?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Lieutenant Trant,” he said, “from the Homicide Division. I’m lucky, Mr. Hadley, to find you home so early from work.”

  There was nothing ominous in the way he made that remark, nothing on which I could put my finger. But, suddenly, I realized that outwitting the police wasn’t going to be at all the sort of thing I’d expected it to be. Let it begin… I remembered the carefree way in which I’d said that last night when Eve had been in my arms.

  Lieutenant Trant was looking around the room, summing it up and summing us up, I felt, through it.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ve come on a rather unpleasant mission.”

  NINE

  Connie had gone grand. She always did with people whose presence in the house wasn’t strictly social—with piano tuners and fund raisers and men come to fix the plumbing. Although I knew it was only a nervous habit, it invariably jarred me, but now I welcomed it as probably the most effective defense in our most indefensible circumstances. Very much the Consuelo Corliss, she gave the detective a gracious, almost patronizing smile.

  “Do sit down, Lieutenant… er…”

  “Trant,” said the Lieutenant and, smiling back at her with equal steadiness, spelled it out. “T—R—A—N—T.”

  He gestured to indicate a chair for her. She hesitated and then sat down. He sat down, too. It had been a tiny exchange, but the Lieutenant had definitely won it. For a moment he watched my wife with his quiet smile, paying no attention to me at all.

  Then he said, “I understand, Mrs. Hadley, that you’ve made rather a protégé of a young Canadian called Donald Saxby.”

  Still being gracious, Connie said, “We’ve read the evening papers, Lieutenant. It’s quite terrible.”

  “So you know he’s been murdered?”

  “Murdered?” echoed Connie. “Of course, we were afraid it might be that. The papers mentioned two shots. How awful. Isn’t that awful, George? But, of course, Lieutenant, if there’s any possible way in which either my husband or I can help…” She let a small movement of her hand complete the sentence.

&nbs
p; For a brief, uninterested moment, Lieutenant Trant glanced at me, then he turned his attention back to Connie. “I’m certainly hoping you will be able to help me, Mrs. Hadley. You see, I’ve just been talking with Mr. Ellerman of the Ellerman Galleries and he tells me that it was as a favor to you that he gave Mr. Saxby a job. He says you had been very interested in the young man and—”

  “That’s rather an exaggeration, I’m afraid,” Connie broke in. “I understood Mr. Ellerman employed him because he thought he’d be suitable for the job. All I did was to arrange an interview. My acquaintance with Mr. Saxby—with Don—was really very slight.”

  “Oh, it was, was it?” Trant’s eyes widened, showing a lot of white around the irises. “I hadn’t realized that.”

  “We just met casually at some private view. He happened to have met a friend of mine in Toronto. We talked. It came out that he needed a job. He seemed very pleasant—and very competent. So I thought of Mr. Ellerman.”

  “And that was the extent of your acquaintance?”

  “Not exactly. I saw him a couple of times—here and there.”

  “But you didn’t know a great deal about him?”

  “Hardly anything, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh,” said Lieutenant Trant again.

  I was torn between alarm at Lieutenant Trant’s soft, unemphasized “oh’s” and grudging admiration for Connie’s remarkable poise. But even the poise alarmed me a little, too. Connie had a way of underestimating people, and I had the uneasy suspicion that Lieutenant Trant was very definitely not someone to underestimate.

  He was in one of the red leather chairs. They had been designed for lolling, but somehow he was managing to sit up very straight in it.

  “I’m disappointed that you didn’t know him better, Mrs. Hadley. At the moment we’re working more or less in the dark. You’re the most promising contact we’ve been able to unearth. He hasn’t been here long from Canada, is that correct?”

  “That’s what I understood,” said Connie.

  “And he didn’t have many friends in this country?”

  “That I wouldn’t know.”

  “You don’t, for example, know some people called Green? Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Green?”

  It had come out so smoothly that it took me a second to realize he was setting a trap. But to my relief I saw that Connie wasn’t shaken at all. She merely wrinkled her brow in concentration.

  “Green,” she said. “They’re not the people who live somewhere in Massachusetts?”

  “They are,” said Trant.

  “Oh, yes, I haven’t met them but I’ve heard of them. Our adopted daughter, Alathea, met them last week at some party. They invited her to visit and she and Don Saxby drove up there to spend the night on Friday. In fact, I believe they were to spend the weekend, but Ala got a little bored with it. She had Don Saxby drive her home Saturday night.”

  There it was, sounding very feeble—our major lie. From now on we were committed.

  “Saturday night,” said Trant.

  “That’s right.”

  “What time did he bring her home?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose around ten.”

  “Did you meet him? I mean, did he come in with your daughter?”

  “No—as a matter of fact, he didn’t.”

  “Since he wasn’t discovered by his cleaning woman, Mrs. Cassidy, until next morning, the medical examiner can’t be too exact about the time of death. But he knows it was Sunday afternoon. He’s put a deadline either way—two P.M. and five P.M. Unfortunately, although the people in the next apartment were at home at the time, they noticed no sound of shots, and the woman at the back of the floor seems to be away. So—that’s the best we can do. Between two and five on Sunday. That would be the very next day after he brought your daughter home from Massachusetts, wouldn’t it?”

  There again he had managed to make a perfectly self-evident remark quiver with ominous overtones. He waited for Connie to say something in reply. When she didn’t, he said, “So that’s all you’re able to tell me, Mrs. Hadley?”

  “I really think it is, Lieutenant.”

  “I see,” said Lieutenant Trant.

  I was looking at him, thinking of the dozens of flimsy deceptions which might collapse at any minute and give us away, trying to gauge something of what was going on behind his enigmatic priest’s face. I didn’t get to first base. He merely sat upright in the red leather chair, looking at nothing in particular and saying nothing.

  When his silence was becoming embarrassing, Connie said, “I’m afraid I don’t know the Greens’ address, Lieutenant. But if you want to get in touch with them, I’m sure that Ala—”

  “Oh, no,” said Trant. “I don’t need to get in touch with them. They’ve already got in touch with me. Mr. Green called me just a couple of hours ago to tell me about Mr. Saxby and your daughter being there for Friday night. That’s why I felt a little hopeful about your being able to give us some pointers. You see, since your daughter was there with him, and Mr. Green seemed to feel they were on quite friendly terms, I got the impression that Mr. Saxby must have been—well, almost one of the family.”

  “Oh, no,” said Connie quickly, too quickly. “Ala hardly knew him. In fact, I think she’d only met him twice; once here. He stopped by one evening for a drink. And then at a party. It was more or less an accident that they drove up to the Greens’ together. I suppose it was just because the Greens happened to invite them both at the same time.”

  That sounded the most improbable of statements, and it seemed incredible to me that Lieutenant Trant could be satisfied to leave it at that. I was waiting for another glimpse of claw from behind the very velvet paws. But then, quite unexpectedly, he rose.

  “Well,” he said, “it doesn’t look as if I’m having much success with you, does it, Mrs. Hadley?” He turned to me. “There’s nothing you want to tell me, I suppose, Mr. Hadley?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Connie at once. “George only met him once, didn’t you, George?”

  “I believe so,” I said.

  “So he was more a friend of the womenfolk,” commented Trant. “Well, I think the most sensible thing for me to do next is to talk to your daughter. So far she’s the last person we know to have seen him alive.”

  He stood looking blandly at Connie. Connie looked back just as blandly.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Lieutenant,” she said, “but I’m afraid she’s not here at the moment.”

  “Then I’ll stop by again when I have the time.” Trant was smiling again, a warm, almost affectionate smile which brought a grotesque reminder of Don Saxby’s smile. “I imagine it will be a mere formality because we don’t expect to have much trouble in catching the murderer.”

  He had said that with an almost theatrical casualness, as if it were a statement which wouldn’t particularly surprise us.

  “Yes, Mrs. Hadley. You see, Saxby had two suitcases packed and he’d burnt some papers in the fireplace. They’re analyzing the ash but I doubt whether they’ll be able to reconstruct anything. However, all that implies he was getting out of town in a hurry, presumably because he was scared of someone. And then, the gun that killed him was left at the scene. There are, of course, no fingerprints, but the gun doesn’t seem to have belonged to Mr. Saxby himself. There’s no record of any license issued to him. I know it sounds unlikely for a murderer to leave his gun behind, but it happens much more frequently than you might suspect. They’re tracing the ownership right now. In a couple of hours, they should at least know who its original purchaser was, and with any luck the owner may be someone with a known grudge against him and… well, that will be that.”

  His smile bathed us in its blandness. Then, without the faintest change of expression, he said, “One thing more, Mrs. Hadley. You mentioned that Don Saxby met a friend of yours in Toronto. Who was that friend?”

  I wanted to shout at Connie: For God’s sake, don’t tell him it’s Mal. Don’t let him get on to the Rysons and through th
e Rysons to Chuck.

  For a moment Connie stood looking most convincingly at a loss. “Now,” she said, “isn’t that silly? I’m sure there was someone. I’m—”

  “It wasn’t by any chance Mr. Malcolm Ryson, was it?” Trant interrupted.

  That was the second time he’d set a trap. Somehow or other, of course, he had already found out about Mal and had slipped it to us that way to see how much he could depend on our truthfulness. Once again Connie recovered admirably. She gave a little rueful shrug.

  “How foolish of me to forget,” she said. “Of course it was Mal.”

  “That’s what Mr. Ellerman thought,” said Trant. “He told me he was almost sure you’d mentioned the fact that Mr. Saxby had known Mr. Ryson in Toronto.”

  “They’d only met,” began Connie. “I don’t think that Mal—” Rut before she could finish, Trant cut in, “I understand, Mrs. Hadley, that your daughter’s engaged to the Ryson boy.”

  “That’s right,” said Connie.

  “The marriage is going to be in about a month?”

  “Yes—on the tenth of December.”

  “I suppose he didn’t go with your daughter and Mr. Saxby to the Greens’? I thought he might have. I mean, well, with their being married so soon…”

  “No,” said Connie. “I don’t think the Greens knew him, but in any case Chuck was in Chicago.”

  “Chicago?”

  “On business.”

  “I see.”

  Once again Trant pulled one of his pauses, and I steeled myself for him to ask whether Chuck had actually been in Chicago yesterday. But he didn’t. He merely glanced down at his nails and up again.

  “Well,” he said, “the thing for me to do now seems to be to have a talk with Mr. Ryson. Let’s hope I’ll have a little more success with him.” He held out his hand to Connie. “Goodbye, Mrs. Hadley. Thank you for being so co-operative.”

  He started for the door. As he did so, a foreboding came to me that this inevitably would be the moment when Ala would dash in and destroy everything. I went with him into the hall and found myself scurrying ahead of him like a butler to open the front door. I glanced up and down Sixty-Fourth Street. There was no sign of Ala.