Night My Friend (29 page)

“Thanks for coming, Les.”

Lester Shaw ran a nervous hand through his thinning blond hair. “What’s the trouble, Harry?”

Toying with the tapered base of his water glass, Harry began to talk. “I think I mentioned to you and Muriel yesterday about this crazy thing Angora told me, how his wife didn’t believe Lois was dead. Well, I didn’t tell you something else. Saturday night I went into New York and almost assaulted a girl down in the Village that looked something like Lois.”

“Harry!”

He held up his hand. “There’s more. Luckily, this girl was very understanding. I bought her a drink and everything was fine. But the point is, what Angora told me has lit some sort of a spark in my own mind. Call it anything you like, but I suppose it’s all traced to the shock of the accident and the fact that I never saw her body.

“There was nothing much to see, Harry. Believe me.”

“I know. I know. But I didn’t see it, and for all I know, maybe she is still alive.” He took the folded letter from his pocket and passed it across the table to Lester. “I received this in the morning mail.”

Lester Shaw read it through quickly. “Do you believe this?”

“No, of course not. And yet I…”

Lester put the note on the table between them. “Harry, you’ve got to come to your senses about this thing. You can’t accept the responsibility for Lois’ death, so you’re building up a fantasy that she’s still alive.”

“What about this note? Who sent it?”

Lester Shaw bit his lip before answering. “Is it possible that you could have sent it to yourself, Harry, without remembering you did it?”

“What? Do you think I’ve cracked up completely?”

“You said you mistook somebody for Lois the other night.”

“That was different.”

“Well, you’ll know soon enough if the note’s on the level. She says she’ll contact you today.”

“Yes,” Harry said quietly, thinking about it. “And right now I don’t know which would be worse—to have her dead or alive.”

The second message came at four that afternoon. It was a telegram addressed to Harry at his office. He ripped it open with an unsteady hand and read the brief words.
Harry, need money desperately. Have Lester Shaw meet me Sherman Park fountain tomorrow morning at seven. Trust me. Lois.

He stuffed the telegram into his pocket and left the office. But he didn’t immediately phone Lester. Instead, he drove out beyond Garden City to Joseph Angora’s old house. As he pulled into the driveway he remembered it was his first visit since the night of the accident. The place looked different now, gloomy and alone in the uncertain light of dusk. It didn’t look at all like a place for parties.

“I just got home,” Angora said, answering the door. “How are you, Harry?”

“Not so good, I guess. I was wondering if I could see Betty.”

“Sure. What about?”

“About Lois.”

Angora nodded and led the way through the familiar rooms. There was a maid at times, and a cook, but Harry saw neither of them now. Betty was alone in her chair on the rear sun porch, staring out toward the west where there was nothing now but a faint remembered glow low in the evening sky.

“How are you, Harry?” she said, holding out her hand to him. “We don’t often have this pleasure on a weeknight.” She was a small woman of perhaps forty-five, who looked just a little the way Queen Victoria must have looked.

“Hello, Betty.”

“So sorry about your wife.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Behind him, he was aware that Angora had joined them on the enclosed porch. “Joe told me something last week. Something you said.”

She looked up at him with steady eyes. “About Lois. I said she was still alive.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I’ve seen her,” Betty Angora answered, quite simply. “I saw her the day after the accident, walking out there in the garden.”

A sort of shiver ran down Harry’s spine at the words. “I think you’d better tell me about it,” he said, in a voice he might have used to comfort a deranged person. Until now he’d always considered Betty to be sound of mind, even though her body was crippled.

“I was dozing in the afternoon,” she said, “and as I came awake I saw her, right down there among the rose bushes. She almost seemed to be looking for buds, but of course it’s still too early for them.”

“Couldn’t it have been a dream?” Harry asked. “A dream brought on by the news of her death in the accident?”

“Perhaps it was a dream,” Betty admitted, “but that really doesn’t matter. What matters was that I had a vision of her alive, and therefore she really
is
alive.”

Angora spoke softly from behind Harry. “Betty’s been right about these things before,” he said. “Remember that little boy who was lost in the desert a few years back? Betty said right from the start he was still alive, and sure enough, pretty soon they found him.”

Harry sighed and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “I received a letter and a telegram signed with her name,” he said. “Did you send them, Betty?”

“Of course not! Why do you fight it like this, Harry? Accept the fact that she’s still alive. I didn’t send you any letters.”

He stared at the deep brown pools of Betty’s eyes, trying to decide if she were lying. But all he saw there was a strangeness he could never understand, a borderland of shadow he could never hope to reach. He did not envy Joseph Angora.

“Thank you,” he said finally. “Thank you for talking to me.”

As he rose to leave, Angora took his arm. “Keep in touch, Harry. If there’s anything we can do…”

“Thanks,” Harry said.

He drove back to his own place and phoned Lester Shaw. In brief, clipped phrases he told him about the latest message, and the visit to the Angora home. “What do you think, Les?”

On the other end of the line Lester Shaw’s voice was uncertain. “I think somebody’s got a pretty mad sense of humor,” he said, but there was a questioning tone in his words. “Do you think Betty Angora sent the messages?”

“Why should she?”

“Why would anybody? Any sane person, at least.”

“Could Lois still be alive, Les?” Harry asked. It seemed he’d been asking that question ever since the accident, if only to himself.

“We got there right after the crash, Harry.”

“But did you actually see her in the car?”

“Harry, Harry! There was a body in the car. It
had
to be Lois.”

“I suppose so. And yet, suppose she really is alive, somehow, and in need of help? This isn’t just some nut that sent the telegram. It’s someone who knew your name, for one thing.”

Lester Shaw sighed. “What do you want me to do now, Harry?”

“I think you should meet her in the morning—whoever she is. I’ll give you a little money, maybe a hundred dollars. And I’ll be waiting nearby. We’ll find out about this, once and for all.”

“All right, Harry. If that’s what you want.”

“I’ll come for you in the morning. At six-thirty.”

On these spring mornings there was a sort of mist off the ocean that often clung till almost noon, obscuring vision and casting a fog-like gloom over all like a smothering blanket. It was like that at Sherman Park, at five minutes to seven.

“She picked this place because she knew about the mist,” Harry said at once.

“She wouldn’t have known yesterday what the weather would be like,” Lester said. “It doesn’t happen every day.”

The park, covering only a few square blocks near the center of the village, was a strange place in the dawn’s half-light. They could barely make out the fountain at its center, and the still bare trees hung damp with droplets of clinging vapor.

“I’ll wait here,” Harry said. “Give you a few minutes alone with whoever it is.”

Lester Shaw nodded. “I won’t give her the money till you show up anyway.” Then he left Harry’s side and hurried toward the fountain.

For some moments Harry strained his eyes, trying to make out something in the brightening landscape. There was no sound but the distant traffic of work-bound motorists and the steady splashing of the fountain water.

He waited until his watch showed five minutes after seven. Then he started walking into the park. Ahead, he thought he heard someone cough. But there was nothing to be seen, nothing but the wetness of the trees and the first beginnings of springtime buds.

“Les?”

There was no one at the fountain, not Lester Shaw or Lois or anyone. He walked all the way around it and was about to start back when he saw something in the fountain, something almost hidden by the rippling, foaming water.

It was Lester Shaw, and he was dead.

After a time a detective came who seemed to be in charge. He had a bulky look about him and constantly jingled the coins in his pants pocket as he spoke. Harry Gordon didn’t like him.

“Name is Kater. Sergeant Kater. Want to tell me what happened?”

“I—I was to meet somebody here,” Harry began. “I told the officer all about it.”

“Suppose you tell me, too. Start with the dead man.”

“Lester Shaw. He was a close friend of mine.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“No! Of course I didn’t!”

“Somebody did. You must have seen who.”

“I didn’t see a thing.”

“Did you hear the shot?”

“No. I heard something like a cough. I suppose that was it.”

Kater held a whispered conversation with another detective, and then came back to where Harry sat on the damp park bench. “Small caliber gun pressed against his jacket. I suppose it could have sounded like a cough. Who did you come here to meet?”

“My wife. Lois Gordon.”

“Did she come?”

“I didn’t see her.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s been dead for over a week.”

The detective nodded his head and stopped jingling the coins. “You’d better come down to headquarters, Mr. Gordon. This is going to take a while.”

It took quite a while. Harry found himself, before the day was over, recounting to Kater every incident since the night of the accident. Conversations and movements and messages and meetings were gone over in detail, and toward the end of the day, when Harry was ready for even a jail cell cot, the detective seemed to be just warming up. He excused himself for a half-hour, and when he returned he was jingling the coins again.

“Just been talking to the victim’s wife,” he said.

“Muriel. How’s she taking it?”

“As well as could be expected. She’s a good-looking girl.”

Harry sighed and wished he had a cigarette. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Men have been killed for lots less. Is there anything between you and Muriel Shaw?”

“Not a thing. I told you everything I know. Why can’t you believe it?”

“The story is a bit hard to take, Mr. Gordon. From where I stand, you’re the best suspect I’ve got.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“Not quite yet.”

He went out again, and Harry spent the next hour staring through the heavy wire window grating, watching home-bound traffic in the street below. He tried to remember what it had been like just two short weeks ago, when Lois was alive and the world was right.

When Lois was alive. Had she ever been really alive?

“I’d like you to talk with a witness,” Sergeant Kater said behind him.

“A witness? To the murder?”

“A man who may have seen your wife.”

Harry’s heart began to thud as he followed the detective into the next room. Kater offered him a cigarette, and then introduced him to an elderly man with white hair who sat uncertainly on a long wooden bench. The man’s name, it appeared, was Otto Carry, and he sold newspapers to the early morning commuters at the Long Island railroad station down the street from Sherman Park.

“A woman,” he said, peering at Harry through thick glasses. “Long blonde hair and a mole on her right cheek. She got off the train from New York around a quarter to seven. I noticed her because not many people come out from the city at that hour.”

“A lot of women have blonde hair and moles,” Harry said uncertainly.

Kater cleared his throat. “He’s already identified the picture in the newspaper.”

“The picture of Lois?”

The detective nodded. “That’s right,” he then confirmed aloud.

“Then she is alive.”

Kater showed Otto Carry to the door. “Thank you, sir. We’ll be in touch.” Then he came back and sat down opposite Harry. “She might be,” he conceded.

“Back from the dead?”

The detective shook his head. “They never come back. But then, perhaps she never went away.”

Greenwich Village that night was alive with the warmth of spring. The streets around Washington Square were crowded to overflowing with the heady mixture of artists and tourists and students and would-be beats who seemed always to come out when the air was clear and inviting. Harry Gordon threaded his way among them, seeking and finally finding a half-remembered doorway.

He was in luck. She was home, and she came to the door after his second knock. “Hello, there. Remember me?”

She frowned for only an instant. “You’re the fellow from the other night! Harry!”

“Right the first time. May I come in?”

Rosie Yates stood aside and let him enter. She’d been washing her hair and it was a mass of brightly colored plastic curlers. “If you don’t mind my appearance,” she told him. “I don’t usually get visitors on Tuesday evenings.”

“It’s such a nice night. I thought you might be out.”

She gestured toward her hair.

“Weekly chore. This and cleaning the apartment. I used to do it Mondays, but now I have a class at the New School.”

The apartment was a confusion of vacuum cleaner and dust cloths, and he saw at once that he had indeed interrupted a weekly chore. “I’m sorry. I should have called first.”

“Not at all! Good to see you again so soon. Want a beer? I don’t have anything stronger right now. That party Saturday night pretty much cleaned me out.”

“A beer will be fine.”

He sat down somewhat uncertainly on the edge of a faded and shabby divan that quite possibly opened into a bed. He heard her rummaging around in the kitchen, and she returned in a minute with two cans of cold beer. “So what’s been new with you?”