Pale Betrayer (17 page)

Rossiter spread his pudgy hands. “I had to. They implied knowledge of a more recent incident.”

“That’s not so!” Mather cried, and then because he remembered something he had thought of small significance at the time, so quickly and, he then believed, effectively had he repulsed the boy, he added now: “Oh, dear God.”

“You see,” Rossiter said, almost smugly, “Big Brother’s always watching you.”

“But it was nothing, Clem! One of my students—I struck him.”

“Oh, a splendid show of manhood! In a public place, no doubt?”

“I tell you, there was no one about. And it was over in a minute. He apologized and that was the end of it.”

“Obviously,” Rossiter said. “And all this took place in the classroom?”

“In the park,” Mather said, and saying it he saw Rossiter’s “Big Brother” image as a sinister reality. It was in the park after all that Jerry had approached him.

“The university park there—it’s rather notorious, isn’t it? I shouldn’t think with your background you would go near it.”

“God damn my background,” Mather cried, a helpless blast. Rossiter’s capacity for niggling provocation had remained unimpaired through the years. Yet he was to be thanked now. One squirmed being made his pivot, but one saw. One had to see.

Mather got up and wandered the room. A row of clocks of many styles sat on top of a glass-enclosed bookcase. They told the varying times throughout the world. Rossiter liked to say: “In Paris now …” They all ticked quietly at differing tempos, but told their times meticulously. Mather, his mind breaking off from his immediate problem, remembered that moment of stillness while Janet turned the pages of her book. It was that moment truly—to which he had had no right—in which he had begun to live. Or to die?

Rossiter, his chair eased round to where he watched the younger man, folded his hands across his belly and said: “You’re still a handsome bastard, Eric.”

Mather turned and glowered at him. He had scarcely heard the words, much less comprehended their content until Rossiter added, a little mocking smile at his soft red mouth, “I suppose if I were to get up, you would strike me also?”

Mather wanted to laugh: the master’s mystique revealed. He shrugged and moved back to the leather chair, standing beside it. He looked down at the man rocking himself round again to the window, and felt for him a pitying contempt of the sort usually reserved for himself. The experience had drained off his fear. Rossiter reached up for the binoculars again. With or without them, a voyeur.

“The F.B.I. agents, Clem—what do you remember of them? What
did
they say? Spare yourself the trouble of finding delicate words for it. I just want to know. What were they like?”

“What were they like? One was tall and blond and silent—the all-American. The other—I remember his name, Edward N. Fleming. But take away the Edward, leave just the initials, and what have you? E. N. Fleming. Life mocking fiction, what? Or as the boys would say, how corny can you get?”

Mather felt the drumbeat of his quickened pulse. “What did he look like, this character called Fleming?”

“Heavy-set, a bulbous face, eyebrows like shoebrushes …”

Mather interrupted. “They showed credentials of course?”

“Identification.” Rossiter looked at him. “Are you suggesting impersonation?”

“I am. How could we find out? There must be a way to check on them—to find out if there actually is an agent by that name.”

Rossiter eased himself out of the chair. “I should think Wes Graham could find out for us—if he’s in the office, that is. I’d rather not call them directly. But really, Eric—it is too fantastic.”

“Please call Graham,” Mather said. Rossiter did not know Tom and Jerry. Or having met the chameleons, he knew them only for what they said they were. He had no doubts how himself. They had had to know their customer in him, and they had come to the best source.

Rossiter, reaching the lawyer on the phone, voiced his skepticism. “It’s nothing really, Wes, but I just want to be sure. They were checking on one of our old instructors. The agent’s name struck me as odd: Fleming, E. N. Fleming …” He paused, listening, and then said: “Is that a fact?”

After hanging up he explained to Mather: “Wes knows of an agent by the name of Spillane. So! The bard said it all, didn’t he—what’s in a name? Shall I ring for lunch? He’ll call us back within the hour.”

They had reached a lumpy dessert which would not have had taste for Mather under any circumstances when the attorney reported on his inquiry to the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No agent by that name had operated out of the district in the past five years.

Rossiter, on the phone, passed it off as lightly as he could. “I might have got the name wrong. In any case there was nothing damaging in my man’s history.” He lied with a practiced grace. “Thank you, Wes. Come up for golf first chance you have, what? The greens were never better.”

Nothing damaging, Mather thought. Lord God in heaven!

“Well, there you have it, Eric, make what you will of it. I had no way of knowing.”

“Of course you hadn’t. The blame is mine all through. But it’s what I had to know.”

Rossiter scraped the last bit of custard from his plate. He washed it down with coffee. “Eric, are you being blackmailed? If you are, take some very ancient advice and go to the police. You can get the villains, you know. Impersonating law officials is a serious offense. And Eric … if there is no other way, I shall testify.”

“Thank you, Clem, but I’ll find another way.”

R
ETURNING TO THE CITY
mid-afternoon, Marks stopped at his parents’ house for something to eat. His mother had gone to a recital at Carnegie Hall, but Willie Lou, who had worked for the Markses since he was a boy and called him “David” still, was prepared at any hour to sit him down to a good meal. “No fussing, just a little fixing,” she said as always. “You go wash up.”

Marks went into his father’s study and called the precinct house. The only important message was the answer to his inquiry to the F.B.I.:
re Eric John Mather no record of investigation
. To be sure the language meant what it seemed to mean, Marks called James Anderson, the F.B.I. liaison man on the case. “Could it mean that Mather was investigated, but that you turned up nothing on him?”

Anderson laughed. “We generally turn up
something
, no matter what it comes to in evaluation. No, it means just what it says, Lieutenant, the Bureau has not initiated any such investigation.”

So, Marks thought, Sally Nobakoff Kelly had told him yet another lie. But why? Why not say she had never shown the record? Why the garnish? She had used the story to justify her own curiosity, and, Marks realized, if she had worked in the Records Office for any length of time, she was bound to have become familiar with F.B.I. investigators. Professors, especially at Central University, had a way of participating in Causes …

Marks found himself staring up at a faded print on the wall alongside his father’s desk: an allegory of the tree of good and evil. She was a great plucker of apples, our Sally, he thought, she was ever ready to hand them out to any damn-fool Adam gullible enough to try one.

“You can come now, David,” Willie Lou said from the door. “Your mother didn’t want much to go today. Now she’s going to be spitting mad, not seeing you.”

Marks, at headquarters an hour later, tried to write up the gist of his interview with Mother St. Ambrose. There was nothing to write really, and yet the nun’s words had affected him deeply. He was annoyed as a result of the visit. With himself? He wasn’t sure. He did not like Mather. Was this the reason he had allowed himself to get on the man’s back? He had no evidence against him. Just his eccentricity and the Byron coincidence out of which he’d been trying to build his own allegory. He could see himself trying that on the Inspector. There was something to be said for dumb cops, he decided. Facts were facts, and fancies were for the birds. He went down to the squadroom where the day’s round-up was breaking up. Redmond, standing with Pererro and Herring who had just come in, called out to Marks to join them.

“I don’t know what we got,” Herring said, “but we got a lot of something.”

Redmond was trying to take the top from a container of coffee, the tab having broken off in his fingers. Marks suggested he use his pipe reamer.

“I thought we had a tough precinct,” Pererro said. “I just got me a Harlem education.”

“Spanish Harlem,” Herring corrected. “That’s special. Most of the docs are Spanish-speaking where we went looking. Some of them are refugees and most of them don’t want to talk, period. Pererro and I figured out that’s because maybe they’re not all the way kosher. You know, maybe they’re not licensed to practice everything? And man, in some of those places you got to practice everything. Captain, did you ever see rickets? We got ’em in these United States in the great city of New York. Kids with legs like this.” He held up two skinny fingers.

“A humanitarian yet,” Redmond growled. The container lid gave way and he splashed the coffee over his hands and the stack of flyers face-down on the table.

Marks, moving the flyers out of the way, picked up the top one. The ink was not dry, but it was the printed composite picture of Anne’s and Mather’s suspect, a pudgy face, dark brows …

“Some of these places don’t have their doc’s address even,” Herring continued, “only a phone number where they can leave a call. And not one out of ten could tell us the kind of car their medic drove. But we got a list of twelve doctors and checked out three of them so far …”

“Why twelve?” Redmond asked.

“That’s the number of places where that handkerchief could’ve come from. Oh, man! Twenty-four gross of them were given out last Christmas by the Hispanic Brotherhood.”

“Twenty-four gross!” Redmond said, “oh my God.”

“One of the brotherhood imported them from Czechoslovakia and by mistake got ten times what he ordered. They were given out to all the charitable institutions on their list, twenty homes, hospitals and orphanages. But wait, man: only eight out of the twenty send their laundry out. That left us twelve just to worry about. We got samples of their washing compound from every one of them.”

“Good work,” Redmond murmured.

Herring grinned. “Old Pererro, the soap sniffer. Just call him Sneezy.”

“Twelve institutions and twelve different doctors?” Marks said.

“Yes, sir. We figured they split up the charity so’s one man wouldn’t have to take too much of it.”

Marks said: “It just seems like a lot of doctors, doesn’t it?”

“You know—about these foreign medics,” Pererro said, “I heard once they’re the guys who get tapped for patching up criminals—you know, plastic surgery.”

The others looked at him blankly.

“I was thinking about the knife,” he explained.

“If it was a surgical knife,” Redmond reminded him. “It’s not in our possession.”

Pererro went on just the same: “How about this angle on the doc we’re looking for: say he had a sideline, a hole down here with a coverup where he could do abortions?”

Herring’s eyes were dancing. He was ready to jump on the new theory, to expand it, but all he got out was: “How about that, man?”

Redmond broke in: “For the love of God, stop playing the D.A.’s men and just bring in the doctor who parked his car in the lumberyard. What a hell of a combine you two make.”

The younger men looked chastened, but not enough so. “I mean it,” Redmond said. “I get paid for doing the thinking for this precinct. You two get paid for doing piece work. Now get all that jazz into report form. Get your samples to the lab, and I’ll make the assignments from there.”

“Yes, sir,” Herring said. Then, glancing at his book: “How about the docs we didn’t get to check out yet?”

“Mañana,” Redmond said. “And maybe the lab can thin them out for you. Did you think of that?”

Herring didn’t say anything.

“If your doctor is on that list you’re going to give us, you could flush him too soon and we might never get him. You’ve done a good day’s work, but you’re just the line men in this team. Remember that.”

Marks, the “Wanted” flyer in his hand, followed Redmond upstairs. “Did Eric Mather show up to verify this likeness, Captain?”

“Not to my knowledge, but we decided to run it anyway. We can always run another one if we have to. It’s good press relations—as your boss pointed out.”

Marks said nothing. So far he had escaped the pressure which was obviously mounting on the men nearer the top.

Redmond sat down at his desk, got out his pipe and filled it. “You know,” he said, “those two
did
do a hell of a job today.”

Marks, his elbows on the desk opposite Redmond’s, nodded. “Twelve doctors, twelve Spanish-speaking doctors. Where did they all come from?”

Redmond lit his pipe, pulling noisily at it. “Cuba? Herring said some of them were refugees. The Trujillo outfit’s washed up now, isn’t it—wherever they came from? I can’t keep up with all their revolutions. But they’re a rotten bunch to tangle with, I’ll tell you that. We had to break up an anti-Castro rally down here one night. I got a finger damn near chewed off. A woman! Christ, the way she carried on I thought I was going to get rabies.” He thrust his hand across the desk for Marks to look at, the little finger extended. “Eight stitches.”

“A Spanish-speaking doctor?”

“Hell, no. I went to Bellevue.” He had to relight his pipe. He paused, the match mid-air, and pointed the pipe at Marks. “That abortion angle Pererro started on? I was thinking of that myself today. There’s some of it goes on down here. Only I couldn’t figure any way to tie it in with Bradley.”

Something clicked with Marks, but he couldn’t quite catch it.

Redmond squinted at him through the maze of smoke he was now pumping out of the pipe. He knew he had started something.

“Something,” Marks said, rapping his forehead with his knuckles. “What is it?”

Redmond said: “She’s a good-looking dame, Bradley’s widow, if you can judge by the picture in this morning’s
Journal
.”

“That’s it!” Marks cried, but almost at once he doubted the significance of his association. “Janet Bradley is a photographer. She has a book about to come out—pictures taken along these streets. When she was taking them, she’d leave her equipment at Anne Russo’s. Bradley himself used to go with her sometimes …”