Shadow of Guilt (5 page)

I was almost at Fifty-Fourth Street when I thought of Eve. I’d planned on going to her after Saxby, but why not talk to her first? The moment I saw her I’d be steady again, I knew, and able to think coherently.

With an immediate lightening of mood, I drove to her street. I left the car in the free parking space opposite her house and ran across into the drab hallway, getting entangled in the leash of an enthusiastic white poodle which was attached to a tall blonde whom I’d seen before and who presumably lived in the building. The moment I pressed the buzzer, the door clicked. I ran up the stairs. Eve, wearing a coat, opened the door.

“George! I was just going out to mail a letter. Thank heavens I didn’t miss you.”

“I couldn’t get away any earlier. I’ve been at Lew’s. Some goddamn Brazilian came into town. Eve baby, I was going to Saxby’s first, then I decided it was better this way.”

I took her in my arms and kissed her as I’d been longing to kiss her all day. But there was no comfort in it, only the knowledge that she, too, would be dirtied up by scandal unless I acted with the coolest and clearest head of my career.

“It’s bad,” I said. “Really bad. I was too much of a fool to realize when I was talking to you on the phone, but—don’t you see? He’s not going to take this lying down. He knows about us.”

Still in my arms, she twisted around to look at me. “You mean he might tell Connie?”

“Why just Connie? What’s to stop him calling some scandal sheet and giving them the whole low-down? He’s a pro. What he wants is money. He got it from the Duvreuxs. He’s going to want it from us. Maybe he’s got us where he wants us, too. Maybe I’ll have to pay him off.”

Her face, very close to mine, was pale, almost haggard.

I went on, “He caught us in that restaurant, didn’t he? And, sucker that I was, I virtually admitted there was everything between us. And then he’s already been to see you. You didn’t realize it, but that’s why he came—to let you know that if we didn’t play ball…” The anger, sour inside me, rose up. “Goddamn him,” I said. “I’ll have to go crawling. I’ll have to…”

“No!” The word came explosively from her. “No, George, I won’t let you. It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t come into your
life…”

“Eve baby.”

“No, George, listen to me. It’s true. I’ve always known it. I tried to dress myself up in my own mind, but it never really worked. I am exactly what Don Saxby and everyone else would think I am—just another sneaky little secretary trying to grab off the boss. Things were all right enough between you and Connie until I came along. And now because of me… George, don’t pay him off. It’s too humiliating and—and once you started, what’s to stop him going on and on? There’d be no end. There’d…”

I grabbed her arms and shook her. “Eve, shut up, for God’s sake.”

“No,” she said, twisting away. “No, George. He knows. All right. He can make us feel guilty about it because we are guilty. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we stopped being guilty, what could he do? And we can. I can go away. I can get out of New York City. Then all he has against you is that he saw you kissing some secretary who doesn’t even exist any more.”

I went to her and, although she started to struggle, took her in my arms. “You’ve forgotten one thing, we love each other.”

“What if we do? Does that give us an inalienable right to have each other, when it means wrecking your career, making things impossible for Connie and Ala? Think how we’d feel. We’re—we’re not Romeo and Juliet. We’re just a couple of people trying to be decent, and if we can’t be decent, if it’s all going to dwindle down into a dirty, sordid little… little… then it’s better to forget the whole thing. No, it’s impossible, quite impossible. I’ll go away. I’ll call my sister. I’ll take a bus to California and…”

She was struggling again in my arms and an icy dread, far worse than any panic induced by Don Saxby, invaded me. If I were to lose Eve…!

“Darling,” I said, “you know this is crazy. We have our whole future together. We can’t throw that away now just to make a noble gesture. I don’t give a damn about scandal or about my job. I can always get another job. And as for Connie, I feel like a heel. Of course I do. I am a heel. But we’ve been over that a thousand times. Nothing’s any different.”

“Of course it’s different. You must see. I’ll go. I’ve got to go—”

“All right,” I said. “If you go, I’ll come right after you—throw up everything.”

“George!”

“I mean it,” I said.

The phone rang.

With a violent movement, she twisted out of my arms, went to the phone and picked it up.

“Hello…? Yes, yes, that’s right… That’s… what?” Suddenly her voice cracked. “No,” she said. “No, it can’t be… it… yes, yes, of course… yes, wait a moment, just wait a moment.”

She put her hand over the receiver. She turned to me. Her blue eyes, gazing at me, had no life in them at all. They looked blind.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s Ala. She’s at Don Saxby’s apartment. He’s dead, she says. He’s there lying on the floor with a gun beside him. He’s been shot.”

The phone in her hand hypnotized me. It didn’t seem like an ordinary phone at all; it was a hieroglyphic symbolizing disaster.

“He’s dead!” Eve repeated. “She says he’s dead.”

I glanced at my watch. Seven minutes past four. Wasn’t that the sort of thing you had to remember? I went to Eve. I took the phone.

I said, “Ala, it’s me, George.”

There was a choking sound at the other end of the wire. “Ala,” I said.

She spoke then. I could hardly make out the words. “I came. I just found him and… What am I going to do? Connie doesn’t know I’m here and I can’t call her. There isn’t anyone but you. Oh, Mrs. Lord…”

She hadn’t grasped the fact that the phone had changed hands. The quality of panic in her babbled sentences fumed from the receiver like a poisonous vapor.

“Ala,” I said. “It’s George. I’m here at Eve’s. It’s George.”

“George?”

“Listen, I’m coming. Stay there. Don’t touch anything.” There was a silence.

“You understand? Wait. I’ll take care of everything. Just wait till I get there.”

There was another silence, then she said, “Yes, all right. But come quickly. Please—quickly.”

I dropped the receiver. Eve’s hand clutched my arm.

“I’m going to get her,” I said. “But I’ll be back. God knows when, but somehow I’ll get back. You be here, understand?”

“Yes. All right. I promise. But—hurry.”

We went together to the door. I ran down the stairs and across the street to the car. The traffic was desultory Sunday traffic. I was at Fifty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in less than ten minutes. I found a parking place right opposite Saxby’s number. It was just a brownstone house like Eve’s, but there, somewhere behind the grimy facade, the blind windows, the bulging air-conditioning units—there was the seed from which a whole new dangerous future was sprouting.

Dead. Shot. Murdered? The word I had been fighting to suppress had asserted itself. Don Saxby murdered—and Ala there.

I crossed the street. I went into the little hallway. No one was passing on the sidewalk. Even then I realized that was important. I saw Don Saxby’s name on a card under a buzzer—fourth floor front. I tried the glass-paneled front door. It was locked. I hesitated. Ala would be terrified when she heard the ring of the buzzer. I should have thought of that before and arranged a signal ring so she could be sure it was me. Then I remembered how one summer afternoon at the Cape years before, when Ala was a kid, I’d taught her to tap out her name in Morse. I spelled out A—L—A on the buzzer. Once and then again. There was a silence that seemed interminable, then the front door clicked. I opened it into the hall.

The little cage elevator was there on the ground floor. I took it up.

On the narrow landing of the fourth floor there were three doors. From one of the doors at the rear of the building came the sound of a radio playing some sort of Spanish dance music. It was the first time in my life that a radio—implying people—had ever seemed threatening. I tiptoed to Saxby’s door. I tapped softly. The door opened inward. I slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind me.

Ala was there, standing immediately in front of me. She was wearing a coat. Her face, framed in the fair, Hadley hair, was shockingly different, stripped of all its pretty, indulged young girl’s assurance. It was hollow under the cheekbones, waxy, like a dummy’s face in a department store window.

“Where is he?” I said.

“He’s dead,” she said. “Somebody’s killed him. He’s dead.”

It was a seedy, bachelor’s room with haphazard bits of furniture and its walls painted mustard. I saw Don Saxby right away. He was sprawled on the gray cotton rug just under the mantelpiece. He was wearing a white shirt and dark gray slacks. He lay on his back. One arm was flung up over his head, its clenched fingers resting against the base of a plant stand from which a sickly yellowish philodendron trailed down. I crossed and looked at him. The eyes, beneath the thick black lashes, were open. He looked horribly himself. There was even a vestige of the easy, affectionate smile frozen on his lips. In his neck was a wound, ragged and bloody. Another wound, staining the white shirt scarlet, was in the left side of his chest.

Two wounds. That’s what I thought first as I stared at the open eyes, the small, amused smile. One shot tearing into the neck; a second shot in the heart. I’d known it was murder, of course. Even before Ala had said so, I’d never from the first second had any doubt about that. But there it was remorselessly stated for me by the fact of the two wounds.

I forced my eyes to move away from the body. I saw the gun. It lay on the carpet just under the frilly skirt of an old overstuffed chair with a sagging seat, gleaming theatrically like an object emphasized by the cameras in a TV melodrama.

I turned back to Ala. She hadn’t moved from the door. She was holding her hands tightly locked together over the middle button of her coat. That was the first time I noticed that she was wearing gloves—thick black knitted Norwegian gloves with a white figure, gloves I’d given her last year for Christmas.

Looking at her was terrible to me because it brought with it the realization of how totally ignorant we are of other people—even people we love. There was nothing from the long years of our living together to tell me: She’s innocent. No instinct to prompt: She’s your niece, your child; of course it’s inconceivable she could have killed a man. I stood watching her, remembering her fits of sudden rage as a child, thinking of what could have happened to her infatuation for Don Saxby once she had accepted the fact that she’d been to him only a commodity, a girl with money in the family, nothing more than that.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”

Her tongue came out to moisten her lips. It was a nervous trick I’d never noticed in her before. It heightened the atmosphere of unreality.

“I…” she said. “I… There’s nothing to tell. I just came.”

“Why?”

“To see him, to find out… Connie’d said those things, all those disgusting things about Toronto. She swore they were true, that she could prove it. I wouldn’t believe her. I had to come and…” She stopped.

I said, “And?”

“I came here. That’s all. And… and I found him. He was lying there… just like that.”

“He was?”

“Yes, of course he was.”

“Then how did you get in?”

The blood came to her cheeks. “I have keys. He… he gave me keys last night in the motel, so I could always come, so—”

“You used the keys?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t press the buzzer?”

“Yes. But… but he didn’t answer and he’d said that sometimes the buzzer didn’t work, so I used the keys and—”

“Give them to me.”

For a moment she looked completely stupid. The awful feeling came: She’s lying. She made up that story. She doesn’t have any keys. Then she went to a table. Her bag was there. She picked it up, fumbled in it and held out to me two keys on a little chain. I took them and put them in my pocket, relief mingling with the ever mounting anxiety.

“So you let yourself in and—”

“I found him,” she cut in passionately. “That’s all. That’s absolutely all. I came in and there he was… just like that, lying on the floor. I ran to him; I saw all the blood; I saw the gun. It’s there, under the chair. I… I wanted to get away. That was all… just to get away. Then I… I was too scared to go out in the hall. There are people in the next apartment. I’d heard their radio. I… I don’t know. It was just panic. I’ve got to get someone to help me, I thought, and… and the only person I could think of was Mrs. Lord. I looked up her number in the phone book. I… I called her and… and then, well, that’s it, that’s all, that’s—”

“With your gloves on?” I said.

She watched me blankly.

“You looked up Eve’s number in the book and dialed the number with your gloves on?” I said.

She glanced down at her hands. “I suppose so. I don’t really remember. I…”

She could have dialed that way, I thought. When you’re in a panic you can do things which could seem impossibly clumsy under other circumstances. Suddenly my normal instincts were re-established and it astounded me that I could have permitted myself even to half suspect her. Of course she had done what she said she had done. How preposterous to connect criminal violence with Ala, who had never got nearer to criminality than a traffic ticket.

I said, “Ala, listen, did anyone see you come?”

“No, no.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. There was no one on the street. No one in the hall or the elevator.”

“And you’ve never taken your gloves off since you were here? You’re sure?”

“Yes, yes. I’m sure now.”

“Okay.”

I moved back to Don Saxby. I knew it might be enormously important later that I had used my eyes to take in whatever there was to take in. His shirt-sleeved left arm was thrown out toward the empty fireplace. I saw that there had been a fire in the grate, not a real fire, but, from the curled heap of black ash, it was obvious that someone had been burning something—probably paper. My eyes moved back to the body and, as they did so, I saw a glistening fragment on the carpet by the left arm—a piece of glass. I saw another and then another and then a much larger jagged piece with a handle attached, clearly the handle of a cocktail shaker. So he’d been holding a cocktail shaker when he’d been shot.