Pale Betrayer (14 page)

That he would die because Peter had died he now believed with an almost religious fervor. How many times in his life he had wanted to die rather than live with the shame he felt. The trouble was that simply to die amended nothing: it was the final run from what should have first been faced. “Thou’dst shun a bear, but if thy flight lay toward the raging sea, thou’dst meet the bear i’ the mouth …”

One had to face the bear. Finally, one had to face the bear. Or die signifying nothing.

He called the air terminal and reserved a place on a nine o’clock flight to Chicago. Then he composed a telegram to the chairman of his department. Let who would take his classes take them.

The telegram dictated over the telephone, it remained for him to somehow commit himself at the other end of his journey. His life was patterned with the escape routes he had allowed himself, all leading away from crises he should have faced. It was after eleven. He called the Bradley house and got Louise. He asked if he might speak to Janet. Blessed Louise, keeper of the shrine! Only she would have called Janet to the phone without any questions.

The receiver clicked and he knew Janet had picked up the phone in another room.

“Yes, Eric. How are you?” It was not meaninglessly asked. He could sense the concern in the quiet depth of her voice.

“Janet, I shall be in Chicago tomorrow. If there is any way I can be of help—or comfort to you, I’ll be staying over at the Palmer House.”

“You’re very kind, Eric.”

“I’m not!” he cried out. “I may need you!” Then: “Goodnight, my dear. God give us courage.”

W
ALTER HERRING WAS NOT
prepared to accept frustration his first night on the detective force. He had made his own breaks all his life, almost always by being competent. Seldom brilliant. Just competent and on the scene. Willing, never eager. The eager Negro was too often taken for an Uncle Tom. Herring didn’t like a number of things about his life, including where he lived, but he wanted to do something about it himself. He didn’t want prefab equality thrust upon him. Besides, he knew enough white people with whom he wouldn’t change places. He said something to this effect when he called his wife to tell her about the transfer. Her first question was: how much more money would he get? It was the one question he had not asked Captain Redmond.

“Well, I’m glad if you’re glad, Wally,” she said with an undertone of long-suffering that infuriated him.

“I should’ve been a baseball player,” he said, which as always finished off the conversation in great style. The next step was to buy her a present better suited to the salary of the ballplayer.

At ten o’clock that night he was sitting in an unmarked car watching the Eastside Lumber yard. His partner had gone around the corner for coffee. They had been on the stake-out then for three hours, three of the dullest hours of his life. Now even the kids had gone indoors. The only interesting thing: he was pretty sure he had spotted a numbers operation in the corner cigarstore. He was sure of it when he saw a patrol car pull up to the side door. One of the cops went in; the other, waiting in the car, switched on the light for a moment. It came as a hell of a shock to Herring to see that it was his some-time partner, Tom Reid. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that—having been included out—except that he was grateful not to have had to decide for himself out loud. He didn’t want the payoff, but he wanted—what? To have been included? What the hell, he was a member of the Patrolman’s Benefit Association. Or was he now? Something—he could not say what—happened inside him when he saw the uniformed cop come out, a cigar box in his hand, and slip into the car. He felt a little sick. The thing was, he shouldn’t have watched at all if he knew he wasn’t going to do anything about it. And he knew he wasn’t.

As soon as the patrol car pulled away he got out of the junk-heap he was sitting in and walked down the street to the lumberyard. There was a small, diamond-shaped window in the door panel. He shone his flashlight inside: just empty space between the wood stacked on either side of the court. He shone the light then on the padlock. He jiggled it, tried the hasp, half-expecting something to give in his hand. He was wild for something to happen. If the doctor never showed again, where were they? No place. But Detective Herring wouldn’t be getting any citation for a bright idea that hadn’t paid off.

“You’re covered, fella. What are you doing there?”

He recognized Bolardo’s voice and sickened with sudden humiliation: half a detective, and a crippled old night watchman could get the draw on him.

“Detective Herring, Mr. Bolardo. Remember?” He turned slowly and let the light of his torch play up the torso of the watchman. Bolardo did not even have a gun. “Your doctor friend didn’t come round tonight.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Bolardo said. “He called me up at supper time and said he wouldn’t be using the place for a few days.”

Herring was a second or two recovering from his violent reaction to the matter-of-fact information, I could’ve told you …

“He called you up. Where?”

“Same place you called me. I’m in the phone book.”

“He could remember a name like Fred Bolardo, but you didn’t even get his name?”

“Didn’t figure I needed to, him being a doctor.”

“What makes doctors so special?” Herring demanded, which was not what he wanted to say at all. To him also doctors were special.

“Just being doctors,” Bolardo said.

“When he
did
leave the car here—suppose you’d had to move it—where would you have got in touch with him?”

“He left the keys in it.”

“And then one night forgot to padlock the door. Oh, man, don’t you see we’re being played for fools, you and the whole police department?”

“Don’t see as I am,” Bolardo said doggedly. “I got my ten bucks.”

Herring tried to hold his temper. Losing it would get him nowhere. “Mr. Bolardo, you say he called you on the phone. How did you know it was him?”

“Because he told me …” Bolardo took off his hat and scratched his head. The fringe of white hair shone like a halo in the darkness. “I guess he must’ve said: this is Doctor … but I didn’t catch the name.”

“And you didn’t ask him to repeat it, knowing we were looking for him? You don’t want us to find him, do you, Mr. Bolardo?”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t. It’s only going to make trouble for me.”

“Man, you’ve already got trouble. Did you tell him the police wanted to talk to him?”

“No, sir. He didn’t ask.”

Herring was beside himself. It was hard to believe that Bolardo was straight. You couldn’t be that dumb. But if you were playing dumb, that wasn’t the way to play it either. Maybe even the doc was straight. He had to make allowances for how much he had wanted to have got onto something really important. “Okay, Mr. Bolardo. Next time you hear from him, get his name, huh? And let us know.”

Herring waited for his partner and then went back to headquarters. Redmond was off duty, but Lieutenant Marks was in the chief’s office. Herring told him the melancholy news.

“What does it mean, Lieutenant?” Herring wanted his own doubts settled.

They were. “It probably means the car is hot,” Marks said. “We may not ever find it.”

“And the doc himself?”

“He called the watchman at supper time?”

“That’s what old Fred told me.”

Marks shook his head. “Why? Why take a chance? Why not let it ride? Was he trying to pump the watchman for information?”

“No, sir. I asked him if he told the man the police were looking for him and Bolardo said, no sir, he didn’t ask and I didn’t tell him.”

Marks looked at the notes in his hand, the description he had just dictated over the phone: the man Anne Russo might have seen but couldn’t accurately remember until Mather filled it in. One man was stocky, the other skinny: they could not possibly be the same person. Yet he felt there was something in common, but he could not remember what it was.

Herring got out the transcript of Fred Bolardo’s testimony for him. Marks glanced through it and then read aloud: “He was mighty careful how he talked, the words you know, like maybe he was a foreigner.” He looked up at Herring, remembering Mather’s final word on his man, his resemblance to a diplomat. He said: “A Russian?”

“The doc? In this neighborhood, Lieutenant?”

“You’ve only got his word to Bolardo that he was making calls in the neighborhood,” Marks reminded him.

“I know,” Herring said doubtfully. “I don’t know why, but I keep thinking of him as Puerto Rican.”

“Why? It’s interesting, but why?” Marks tried to prime him.

Herring thought for a moment. “The car, I guess. You know the docs in Harlem, there ain’t many of them driving Cadillacs.” He began to pace restlessly, stopping to run his hand along Redmond’s desk, then wiping the dust on the seat of his trousers. He stopped in front of Marks. “There’s something else in the back of my mind, but I just can’t get hold of it.”

“Me too,” Marks said. He got up and put away the Bolardo file himself. “It’ll come to you in the middle of the night. Just hold it to morning, will you?”

Herring grinned.

Marks said: “The only lead we have to him now is the handkerchief, and that’s about as identifiable as a diaper on a clothesline.”

“I was thinking about that,” Herring said. “Institution laundered, isn’t that what the lab report said? But hospitals don’t give out handkerchiefs, boss.”

“They don’t even use them,” Marks said.

“That’s what I mean, man. We’re living in a time of disposable sanitation. It’d be an old-fashioned place that’d give out handkerchiefs. Maybe foreign even, and a small place like a mission—or an old folks’ rest home, huh? That’d be a place where a foreign doc could make a few bucks. You know, visiting physician …”

“And surgeon,” Marks added grimly.

“Yeah, there’s that,” Herring said.

Marks was tired and his cigarette package was empty. He felt as though he had a lethal residue of poison in his lungs. “That’s as good reasoning as any of the rest of us have come up with. Put it in the basket to start checking out in the morning.”

Herring went down to the squadroom to type his report. He tried to keep his imagination under control, to shut out new dreams of glory. The concentration it required for him to use the typewriter at all helped.

Pererro, about to go off duty, paused and watched him for a minute. When Herring looked up he said solemnly: “I didn’t know you could play the piano, Wally.”

Herring went back to work. “Go away, man. I’m composing a symphony for two fingers.”

M
ARKS, DETERMINED TO LEARN
what he could of Mather as quickly as possible, went in the morning to the university president’s office for permission to see the school’s dossier on the teacher. But in order to make his inquiry seem a routine affair, he asked also to see the records of Robert Steinberg and Anne Russo.

A secretary deposited him in a small office adjoining that of the president, assured him that he would be comfortable there while waiting, and closed the door on him. There were three straight-backed chairs and a table on which lay a back issue of the
Journal of Education
. The room smelled of pencil sharpenings. A single picture hung on the wall, an ancient print of the then new administration building. No windows. Air reached the room through a foot-square grill near the ceiling. Marks speculated on whether it was large enough for a man to crawl through: a room not intended for claustrophobics. He opened the door and left it open, and then angled his chair so that he could watch the secretary-receptionist at her work.

A pretty girl, she sat at her typewriter very erect, and every paragraph or so without letting up work she stretched her neck, turning her head from side to side, her chin out. Unaware that she was being observed or, more likely, unconscious of the gesture itself, she sometimes lifted her graceful fingers to caress with an upward stroke the plumpness beneath her chin. Marks grinned, suddenly realizing that double chins were part of the typist’s occupational hazards.

A student-messenger brought a file to the reception desk. The girl directed him with it to the room where Marks was waiting. It was the admissions record of Anne Russo.

Marks soon found himself totally absorbed: Anne Russo, the daughter of an editor of an Italian language newspaper, had finished high school at the age of fifteen, standing first in a class of sixty-five, and college at the age of eighteen; she had slipped in class standing: second among fifteen hundred thirty. Her list of honors was frightening. He was glad he had met her before seeing her record and it was not to be remotely suspected from her unassuming if earnest manner. Marks thought about the differences among people, even within families. What turned the daughter of a literary man to science? How did her father feel about it? Would the pendulum swing back with the next generation? What would Anne want for her children? What did he himself want for his, assuming he would someday have some? Not the law. He had mistakenly followed his father, a man, he thought wryly, much stronger than himself …

There was a tap at the open door. Marks glanced up to see Sally Nobakoff standing there. She was almost as surprised to see Marks as he was to see her. Sally, away from the Red Lantern, was a different miss, direct and business-like. She wore her auburn hair parted in the middle and braided around her head.

“I need your signature for these, sir.” After the first startled look of recognition, she struck the attitude of total stranger.

“Are you in charge of them?” Marks asked, scrawling his name on the form she provided.

“Oh, no. I’m just a clerk.”

“I’m curious,” Marks said. “Are they kept under lock and key?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when my request reached your office, you got the key to the file, got them out and brought them up?”

“Not, not exactly,” she said with a slight hesitation. “Miss Katz is in charge. She gave them to me and told me to bring them up to the president’s office.”

Marks looked at the form he had just signed:
CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL, CENTRAL UNIVERSITY RECORDS OFFICE
. He gave it to Miss Nobakoff and received in return a large Manila envelope. He watched her to the door. In the very modern sack dress she revealed little of the qualities that made her stand out by the light of the Red Lantern. He opened the envelope.