The dresser told me nothing. I searched in her closet, pulling her dresses off the hangers, fumbling in pockets.
I found her paint box on a high shell. The brushes were hard and stiff. When had she painted with these? The small bottle of turpentine had never been opened. The cap stuck when I tried it. And some of the paint tubes were hard. The tiny palette yielded no oil to my probing fingers. She hadn’t used these paints in many months. Had she been lying to me about the school? I put down the paint box and stared at it. And then I saw the piece of colored paper in the corner, half hidden under the tubes. It was a match box. On the cover a half-naked dancer lifted her legs in a decorative pose. In red letters, over her head, were the words: The Cellar.
I fingered the matchbox, working my memory over the name. The Cellar? This was a cheap clue, a comic-strip lead, unimportant and dull, leading everywhere and nowhere. Once, before we were married, Gwen and I had gone there, to stand at the bar, to sip our beer and stare at the characters around us. The Cellar was a weak imitation of Paris on the left bank. The Cellar left me cold. Even now. I stuffed the match box into my pocket.
The gentle noise from the living room brought the panic to my heart. Somebody was knocking. (In the wild moment I forgot that I had asked Abe Freedman to come.) I stood there, feeling my legs go soft under me, listening to the sound of a dripping faucet in the kitchen, hearing the quiet as it crept through me and sang in my ears.
Then the knocking again—twice, soft and slow.
I ran through the living room and opened the door. Abe Freedman stood there, his face on fire with the heat of his exertions. In the shadowy hall I saw that he was reaching out a hand for me, and I took it and felt strengthened by his friendly pressure. He mopped his face and when the handkerchief came away he was smiling his usual smile, burying his worry for me, working to assure me that all was right with the world.
But his automatic smile faded in the bedroom. He stood there, staring down at Gwen and as he stared he removed his hat and placed it on the small night table. He knelt at the bed. Then he came away from it and stepped toward me.
“Did you touch her?”
I shook my head.
“I want to give her the once over lightly, Steve.”
I turned away from him as he knelt over her. He did not take long to finish his examination and when it was done he tapped me on the shoulder and I followed him out of the room.
He said, “You were in there before. What did you get?”
I showed him the matchbox and he made notes. “You know this place?”
“Years ago,” I said. “It’s probably worthless, Abe.”
“I’ll check it,” he said, and tossed it back to me. He waited for me to sit down in the easy chair and start a cigarette. “Let’s have the yarn, Steve, from the beginning.”
I told him about the afternoon, all of it. He listened at the window, working over his glasses with a handkerchief and then putting them on and looking out into the blackness that was the back yard. When I had finished he continued to measure the darkness for a long minute. He walked away from me, into the kitchen, and I heard him grunt and cough.
“Come in here and we’ll case this together,” he said.
I joined him in the kitchen. He had a fresh bottle out of the cupboard and was filling two glasses. He said, “The Scotch. Is this the bottle you saw this afternoon? Take a good look at it.”
“I didn’t see the bottle.”
“Did you handle it?”
“A little while ago,” I said.
Abe clucked and lifted the bottle. He picked up a dish towel and wiped away at it. He polished it thoroughly and then went on to the glass, rubbing the surface of it and letting it down gently. “You’ll cut your throat that way, Steve. What else did you touch?”
“You can’t rub me out that way, Abe. This is my place. I’ve been around in it, my fingerprints are all over it.”
“Naturally. But we don’t want you lousing up the props from this afternoon, mister. The boys from Spring Street are funny fellows. They’ll build this thing like something off Broadway. Do you get what I mean? They’ll turn their cameras on the stuff that was used in the killing—the props, the gimmicks around the body, like liquor glasses and knives and doorknobs and windowsills. They play it for time and motive and if one of them ever came up with a set of your prints on a liquor glass you’d be one of the actors, Steve—you’d be put in position on the stage, where they want you.” He went quickly out of the kitchen and stood in the center of the living room, squinting around and tapping his derby in his palm. “All right. We can give them the room, as is. Now let’s get working on the boy in the striped shirt. What about the stripes?”
“Gray and blue.”
He had a little black book in his hand now and looked up from his writing. “You say it as if you mean it. That must have been quite a shirt.”
“I’ll never forget it, Abe.”
“What else won’t you forget?”
“His face.”
“Tell me about it.”
Tell about a face? You reach out for words but they hang back in the dark corners of your mind, held there by the emotional blocks, the blindness of hate, the shock of the moment. You build the face into a caricature, a type, a grotesque mask. He was a composite, the man in the striped shirt—a combination of evil and smoothness, hardness and power, coolness and murder. I closed my eyes and screamed for my memory to call him back to me. But my memory was a closed book, and even the title was blurred.
I said. “He was a tough boy, Abe.”
“Tough like what?”
“Italian, maybe. I can’t remember.”
“Think, Steve. Tough like who? Give me a crumb.”
“It won’t work,” I said.
He shook his head at his little black book. “You know better than to talk that way. A crumb is a crumb, and we may pick up a lead from anything in the world—a shoelace, a shirt, the color of his shoes, the way he combed his hair. We can get this guy if we use our heads, Steve. I’ve seen it done plenty of times. You’ve got to keep that mind of yours oiled, or you’ll miss plenty in this rat race.” He slapped his book into his palm and then put it away. “Tough like who? Bogart? Give him a label.”
“Like Raft,” I said. “But much heavier and darker. Heavy in the eyebrows and kinky hair.”
“Much better. How about his suit?”
I shook my head. “He was wearing a very fancy wrist watch, Abe.”
“How fancy?” He was alert and eager for my descriptive details. “Heavy band?”
“Very fancy,” I said. “Expensive.”
“Drop him,” Abe said. “How about some other prospects? We can’t make up our minds that Mr. Striped Shirt killed Gwen. Even the Spring Street boys wouldn’t be that quick with it. Think of somebody else now.”
“I can’t figure anybody else. I’m dead in the head, Abe.”
“Think. Who else do you know who might have done it?”
I closed my eyes and turned the light on in my brain. But my mind was an empty hall, and a disturbing wind rushed through it.
“It was somebody she knew on her own,” I said.
“She had her own friends? You and she were on the outs?”
I shook my head wearily. I began to explain. It isn’t easy to empty your soul of a heartache that has grown over the years, a disturbance that has built itself into a cancer, a living blight, a disease of the ego, a torture that has gnawed at you for almost four years. I fumbled for words with which to make it clear to him. I built it as a simple synopsis.
“Gwen was a strange girl, Abe. We were never completely happy. I always felt that she was somewhere on another street, somehow. It was her coldness and her disinterest that used to drive me crazy. We were all right for about a year, happy as a couple of kids, excited about each other, but even in
those days I began to sense a subtle change in her, a kind of restlessness. She seemed depressed and moody at all times and there was nothing I could do to take her out of her mood.”
“She go out much? Alone?”
“During the day she did, I suppose.”
“And not at nights?”
“Not until last fall. She began to go to an art school then.”
Abe’s eyes lit up. He made a note in his book. “You know the school?”
“I’ve never been there, but I know the name.”
“Follow it, Steve. It’s a big lead. She might have been meeting a guy there. You never know. She must have met this gent somewhere. Maybe you can think back and place him. Stop and remember. Think.”
I backtracked into my memory. I thought down through the years, through the quick years of my life with Gwen, through the parties, the dinners, the Bohemian affairs we had attended, the small sea of faces we had met, the actors, the authors, the artists. Who among these would murder? Who among these knew Gwen so well that jealousy gnawed at him, ate at him to the point of mania? I remembered a man named Bert McPhail, an actor, a juvenile lead out of musical comedy. There was a night at a party when Gwen had taken too much Bourbon, when she had waxed slightly amorous with Bert McPhail. I had flared up that night. McPhail and I were both drunk enough to have swung at each other. But it passed off. Somebody got him out of there before I swung. He had disappeared since then and only existed now because I strained to reach him. I could recall no further mention of his name. But did that mean anything now?
Gwen had moved in a mysterious pattern. Gwen had somehow met the man in the striped shirt. And if she knew him well, how many others did she know?
I said, “There was a man named Bert McPhail, an actor. A pretty boy from the musical comedy world.”
“What show?”
“It was a long time ago, Abe. He wouldn’t be playing in the same show now, even if I remembered it.”
“A New Yorker?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Who else?”
I said, “The only other man I can reach for is our neighbor—a cartoonist named Ken Sisley.”
“Where is he?”
“Across the hall.”
Abe reached for his derby. “He’s yours, Steve. I’ll take the rest of it. When we go out of here you want to lock your door and pretend your wife’s gone away for the weekend, do you understand? Nothing’s happened up here, nothing at all. We’ve got time. We’ve got plenty of time to work a few leads on this deal. Get moving after this Sisley man, and when you find him, pump him dry. Don’t give up with him. You’ve got to remember that the scraps of small stuff can be most important in a deal like this. Linda tells me she’s looking for Harvey. When he comes down, we’ll have another head with us—a good head. Pull yourself together now—take another shot and get moving after Sisley. I’ll meet you later. Tell me where.”
I said, “Go back to your place, Abe. I’ll call you.”
He grabbed both my arms and shook me gently, smiling his usual smile at me. “Listen, Steve, you don’t want to worry about this. There’s no need for you to hide—not yet. Nobody knows about this. We can meet anywhere in town, even in the Tenth Precinct, do you understand? You meet me in Mama Frichio’s, over on Eleventh. You know it?”
“When?”
“Whenever you finish. If you pick up a lead, phone me there to let me know. Mama is a good pal of mine. She’ll give me your message.”
When he walked out of the apartment he took a sizable lump of my ego with him. I went back into the kitchen and downed a hooker and then another before putting out the lights. With the black fiat behind me, I crept through the hall and closed the door, fighting hard to kill the fear that tightened the muscles in my legs. And then I turned the lock and it was all behind me.
I stood there against the door, leaning into it, hard, as though I might have to stand this way to hold it shut against the outside world, as though my body against it might keep the mess away from other eyes. I sweated freely now. I might have been digging a grave. I might have been climbing a cliff. The sounds of the house filtered through to me. Downstairs, Mrs. Monati clattered her dishes. A passing couple laughed in the street. A child’s voice lifted in song from far away. Above me, somebody walked across a room, slowly. In the hall, the silence built itself around me, working at my brain, freezing me to the door.
I found myself staring at Ken Sisley’s door. Then I was crossing the hall and knocking, gently. I pushed open the door and went in. The room was empty. I stood there, squinting into the gloom, surprised by the gloom. You live in a house for three years and get to know the neighbors, some as friends; others as nodding strangers. But Ken was no stranger. For three years he had lived according to pattern. He was always home at this hour. He would be playing his records and sipping his gin until he heard me close the door to our flat. Then he would knock and walk in always at a quiet moment. We were good friends. We expected him.
And where was he now? It became important to find him, to talk to him. He was a link to Gwen—the daytime Gwen—the Gwen I never really knew. Ken might have seen the man in the striped shirt. Ken could tell me things.
I stood in the middle of his room, measuring the Bohemian disorder. In the gloom, it was all suddenly important to me. I had been in this room dozens of times and yet had never seen it. Along the street wall hung an assortment of original cartoons, done by Ken’s contemporaries. Around and about them, spread haphazardly, were the pencil sketches, the nudes Ken had done in art school a long time ago. His drawing board was littered with small scraps of paper. Against the stool leaned his small red portfolio. On the tabouret, a large vase of water, dirty gray, as dirty as the room itself. There was a studio couch at the back wall. I went to it and stood over it and stared at it. The bedspread was a fancy piece of frippery—a scarlet throw, provocative because of the silhouetted nude upon it. Behind the couch he had hung his “talking picture”—a large torso, done in ripe flesh tones and as bawdy as a bad joke.
This, then, was the room. A man could rest on the couch of an afternoon, and listen. The house was ancient. The walls were only partitions, plasterboard, and wallpaper. On many an evening I had heard the blare of Ken’s phonograph through this wall. And he—how much had he heard? He must have been a witness to our arguments at dinner time, the high tremor of Gwen’s voice, the uneasy anger of mine. He knew us well, Ken did.
And in the daytime? If Gwen had callers, he must have known about them, heard them; remembered their voices. He might unlock the door for me. If I could trace her movements, her friends, her plans, her assignations—
I went down the stairs, holding my body to the wall. I wanted to avoid Mrs. Monati.
She saw me at the door.
“Mr. McGrath!” she shouted, freezing me to the worn rug, coming at me with her hands outstretched, her face full of friendliness and concern. “You are going out? So early? Is anything wrong?”
I let her hold my arms. I told myself that she suspected nothing. She was reacting only to my break in routine. I had never left the house at this hour before. Not without Gwen. I was smashing the pattern of behavior she expected of me.
I said, “Nothing at all, Mrs. Monati. Do you know where Gwen is?”
It was a bold lie, but the words were out. It was a stab at something and nothing. I watched her expressive face react to my question. She lifted her eyebrows and showed me her surprise. “She is not upstairs? Then she must have gone out when I went to the store this afternoon. I have been home most of the day.” She had her hands on me and now she squeezed my arm. “You have not had supper, is that it? Come, I will give you something. I have escallopini, and my husband is not here tonight. It will serve him right for telephoning me so late that he could not come home. You will eat Luigi’s dinner. Come—”
“I’d better not. I’d like to
find Gwen.”
“There is time. You will feel better with some food inside.”
I let her pull me into her kitchen. Her food was good. I ate slowly, listening to her musical voice, wondering how I could ask her about Gwen. She hovered over me happily. She turned my mind back to the first week of our tenancy in her house. She had been friendly to both of us then. I remembered the time she came upstairs to invite us to dinner. We should have accepted her invitation. She meant only to be a good neighbor. But Gwen had laughed it off. I wondered, now, whether Mrs. Monati had caught the meaning of Gwen’s frigid smile.
I said, “I can’t imagine where Gwen went. She’s never done this before.”
“Do not worry about her. The women are sometimes that way, Mr. McGrath. She perhaps is shopping uptown, or out in the nice fresh air.”
“It’s not like Gwen, Mrs. Monati. She’s been acting strangely lately.”
She was at the stove when I said it. I saw her pause over the Italian coffee pot. It was a quick gap in her movement. She reached for the pot and studied it as she crossed the room. She shook her head at it as though it were a small animal. The little gears of her mind were working out a problem. She was as obvious as an insult. Her broad, pleasant face was not built for intrigue.
She said, softly, “Tell me, Mr. McGrath—you are unhappy? You and your wife are having trouble?”
I nodded. It would be better to give her the lead. She might talk if I had her sympathy. She would tell me things, perhaps, the important trivia about Gwen’s daytime life. It was an effort to continue with the food, to watch her seat herself at the end of the table, to know that she was staring at me, wondering about me, making up her mind how to tell me. Impatience tightened my hand on the fork. This was no moment for vague dialogue and roundabout conversation I needed facts quickly. But there was no way to rush Mrs. Monati. I could do nothing but sit and wait and chew her tomatoed veal chop.
“I have known about this,” she said with a sigh. “I have felt it for a long time now.”
She nodded at the tablecloth, her eyes closed, smiling wisely at some secret thought.
Friday for Death Page 4