Shadow of Guilt (8 page)

“And that was the extent of your acquaintance?”

“Not exactly. I saw him a couple of times—here and there.”

“But you didn’t know a great deal about him?”

“Hardly anything, I’m afraid.”

“Oh,” said Lieutenant Trant again.

I was torn between alarm at Lieutenant Trant’s soft, unemphasized “oh’s” and grudging admiration for Connie’s remarkable poise. But even the poise alarmed me a little, too. Connie had a way of underestimating people, and I had the uneasy suspicion that Lieutenant Trant was very definitely not someone to underestimate.

He was in one of the red leather chairs. They had been designed for lolling, but somehow he was managing to sit up very straight in it.

“I’m disappointed that you didn’t know him better, Mrs. Hadley. At the moment we’re working more or less in the dark. You’re the most promising contact we’ve been able to unearth. He hasn’t been here long from Canada, is that correct?”

“That’s what I understood,” said Connie.

“And he didn’t have many friends in this country?”

“That I wouldn’t know.”

“You don’t, for example, know some people called Green? Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Green?”

It had come out so smoothly that it took me a second to realize he was setting a trap. But to my relief I saw that Connie wasn’t shaken at all. She merely wrinkled her brow in concentration.

“Green,” she said. “They’re not the people who live somewhere in Massachusetts?”

“They are,” said Trant.

“Oh, yes, I haven’t met them but I’ve heard of them. Our adopted daughter, Alathea, met them last week at some party. They invited her to visit and she and Don Saxby drove up there to spend the night on Friday. In fact, I believe they were to spend the weekend, but Ala got a little bored with it. She had Don Saxby drive her home Saturday night.”

There it was, sounding very feeble—our major lie. From now on we were committed.

“Saturday night,” said Trant.

“That’s right.”

“What time did he bring her home?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose around ten.”

“Did you meet him? I mean, did he come in with your daughter?”

“No—as a matter of fact, he didn’t.”

“Since he wasn’t discovered by his cleaning woman, Mrs. Cassidy, until next morning, the medical examiner can’t be too exact about the time of death. But he knows it was Sunday afternoon. He’s put a deadline either way—two
p.m.
and five
p.m.
Unfortunately, although the people in the next apartment were at home at the time, they noticed no sound of shots, and the woman at the back of the floor seems to be away. So—that’s the best we can do. Between two and five on Sunday. That would be the very next day after he brought your daughter home from Massachusetts, wouldn’t it?”

There again he had managed to make a perfectly self-evident remark quiver with ominous overtones. He waited for Connie to say something in reply. When she didn’t, he said, “So that’s all you’re able to tell me, Mrs. Hadley?”

“I really think it is, Lieutenant.”

“I see,” said Lieutenant Trant.

I was looking at him, thinking of the dozens of flimsy deceptions which might collapse at any minute and give us away, trying to gauge something of what was going on behind his enigmatic priest’s face. I didn’t get to first base. He merely sat upright in the red leather chair, looking at nothing in particular and saying nothing.

When his silence was becoming embarrassing, Connie said, “I’m afraid I don’t know the Greens’ address, Lieutenant. But if you want to get in touch with them, I’m sure that Ala—”

“Oh, no,” said Trant. “I don’t need to get in touch with them. They’ve already got in touch with me. Mr. Green called me just a couple of hours ago to tell me about Mr. Saxby and your daughter being there for Friday night. That’s why I felt a little hopeful about your being able to give us some pointers. You see, since your daughter was there with him, and Mr. Green seemed to feel they were on quite friendly terms, I got the impression that Mr. Saxby must have been—well, almost one of the family.”

“Oh, no,” said Connie quickly, too quickly. “Ala hardly knew him. In fact, I think she’d only met him twice; once here. He stopped by one evening for a drink. And then at a party. It was more or less an accident that they drove up to the Greens’ together. I suppose it was just because the Greens happened to invite them both at the same time.”

That sounded the most improbable of statements, and it seemed incredible to me that Lieutenant Trant could be satisfied to leave it at that. I was waiting for another glimpse of claw from behind the very velvet paws. But then, quite unexpectedly, he rose.

“Well,” he said, “it doesn’t look as if I’m having much success with you, does it, Mrs. Hadley?” He turned to me. “There’s nothing you want to tell me, I suppose, Mr. Hadley?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Connie at once. “George only met him once, didn’t you, George?”

“I believe so,” I said.

“So he was more a friend of the womenfolk,” commented Trant. “Well, I think the most sensible thing for me to do next is to talk to your daughter. So far she’s the last person we know to have seen him alive.”

He stood looking blandly at Connie. Connie looked back just as blandly.

“I’m terribly sorry, Lieutenant,” she said, “but I’m afraid she’s not here at the moment.”

“Then I’ll stop by again when I have the time.” Trant was smiling again, a warm, almost affectionate smile which brought a grotesque reminder of Don Saxby’s smile. “I imagine it will be a mere formality because we don’t expect to have much trouble in catching the murderer.”

He had said that with an almost theatrical casualness, as if it were a statement which wouldn’t particularly surprise us.

“Yes, Mrs. Hadley. You see, Saxby had two suitcases packed and he’d burnt some papers in the fireplace. They’re analyzing the ash but I doubt whether they’ll be able to reconstruct anything. However, all that implies he was getting out of town in a hurry, presumably because he was scared of someone. And then, the gun that killed him was left at the scene. There are, of course, no fingerprints, but the gun doesn’t seem to have belonged to Mr. Saxby himself. There’s no record of any license issued to him. I know it sounds unlikely for a murderer to leave his gun behind, but it happens much more frequently than you might suspect. They’re tracing the ownership right now. In a couple of hours, they should at least know who its original purchaser was, and with any luck the owner may be someone with a known grudge against him and… well, that will be that.”

His smile bathed us in its blandness. Then, without the faintest change of expression, he said, “One thing more, Mrs. Hadley. You mentioned that Don Saxby met a friend of yours in Toronto. Who was that friend?”

I wanted to shout at Connie: For God’s sake, don’t tell him it’s Mal. Don’t let him get on to the Rysons and through the Rysons to Chuck.

For a moment Connie stood looking most convincingly at a loss. “Now,” she said, “isn’t that silly? I’m sure there was someone. I’m—”

“It wasn’t by any chance Mr. Malcolm Ryson, was it?” Trant interrupted.

That was the second time he’d set a trap. Somehow or other, of course, he had already found out about Mal and had slipped it to us that way to see how much he could depend on our truthfulness. Once again Connie recovered admirably. She gave a little rueful shrug.

“How foolish of me to forget,” she said. “Of course it was Mal.”

“That’s what Mr. Ellerman thought,” said Trant. “He told me he was almost sure you’d mentioned the fact that Mr. Saxby had known Mr. Ryson in Toronto.”

“They’d only met,” began Connie. “I don’t think that Mal—” Rut before she could finish, Trant cut in, “I understand, Mrs. Hadley, that your daughter’s engaged to the Ryson boy.”

“That’s right,” said Connie.

“The marriage is going to be in about a month?”

“Yes—on the tenth of December.”

“I suppose he didn’t go with your daughter and Mr. Saxby to the Greens’? I thought he might have. I mean, well, with their being married so soon…”

“No,” said Connie. “I don’t think the Greens knew him, but in any case Chuck was in Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

“On business.”

“I see.”

Once again Trant pulled one of his pauses, and I steeled myself for him to ask whether Chuck had actually been in Chicago yesterday. But he didn’t. He merely glanced down at his nails and up again.

“Well,” he said, “the thing for me to do now seems to be to have a talk with Mr. Ryson. Let’s hope I’ll have a little more success with him.” He held out his hand to Connie. “Goodbye, Mrs. Hadley. Thank you for being so co-operative.”

He started for the door. As he did so, a foreboding came to me that this inevitably would be the moment when Ala would dash in and destroy everything. I went with him into the hall and found myself scurrying ahead of him like a butler to open the front door. I glanced up and down Sixty-Fourth Street. There was no sign of Ala.

Trant reached me at the front door and paused. “This is a bad business, Mr. Hadley.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Your wife’s a fine woman and I understand she’s done a lot of good for this city. I’d hate to involve her, however slightly, in something as sordid as this.”

“It can’t be helped,” I said.

He was looking at me now as if he hadn’t really seen me before. The ambiguous eyes—blue? gray?—surveyed my face as if it were a rather tricky chart which had to be memorized in a hurry.

“It’s a great relief to me, Mr. Hadley, that you people knew Don Saxby so casually. There’s nothing I hate more than having prominent people tangled up in a murder case. The D. A. hates it, too. Everybody hates it, in fact.” He paused, looking grave. “You know, when I talked to Mr. Green, I was a little worried.”

“What about?” I said.

“You know how people are, how easy it is for them to get the wrong impression.” He paused again. “Mr. Green seemed to feel from watching your daughter and Saxby that she was… well, that she was in love with him.”

“In love?” I echoed, hoping that my voice had the right inflection of incredulity.

“That would have been a mess, wouldn’t it?” Lieutenant Trant grinned. To me it was an unnerving grin. “Think of it… if your daughter had got mixed up with Saxby just a couple of weeks before her big, slap-up society wedding to the Ryson boy! Well… I’m glad I don’t have that on my hands.”

He held out one of those hands to me. I took it, and as his cool, dry fingers touched mine, I had the panicky impression that he hadn’t believed a single word Connie and I had said, that in some uncanny way he already knew everything about all of us and was merely, for some cryptic reason of his own, biding his time. It was absurd, I knew, but it was a chilling sensation.

He withdrew his hand from mine. For one moment I thought he was going to pat my arm encouragingly, but he didn’t.

He merely said, “Now, Mr. Hadley, don’t you worry. I have a hunch that this is going to be a very routine case. In fact, I feel we’ll get everything straightened out the moment we’ve traced the ownership of the gun.”

He smiled again and started down the marble steps toward a black police car. I stood watching him climb into it and, as I did so, I remembered that the Rysons had a gun. After he had married his “girl bride,” Mal had insisted on having a gun in the house for protection. Vivien had made a gag about his keeping it in a drawer between their beds.

Their bedroom! Abruptly came the memory of Vivien’s voice on the phone the night before. It sounded in my mind, uncomfortably distinct, right down to the tinkling laugh.

Chuck was so strange last night, really most peculiar. Right after dinner he disappeared for ages. Finally I went to look for him and he was in Mal’s and my bedroom, sitting on my bed.

Lieutenant Trant had got into the car. He was leaning out of the window and lifting his arm to me in a friendly farewell.

It seemed so odd, said Vivien’s voice. I mean, why our bedroom? Why not his own?

I went into the house and closed the door. Connie came hurrying out of the library.

“George, that terrible man. Do you think he believes us?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what are we going to do? George, we’ve got to call Vivien before he gets there. We’ve got to warn her about Chuck. She
can’t
tell him that none of us know where he was on Sunday.”

I’d decided not to tell her about the gun yet. If I was right, it was going to hit her more powerfully than anything else that could have happened; there was no point in inflicting it on her until I was sure. I went to the telephone in the hall. Then I thought of Mary. It would be safer in the library.

Connie followed me there, hovering, supervising. I dialed the Rysons. I got Vivien right away.

I said, “Vivien, do you know about Mr. Saxby?”

“The wicked Mr. Saxby, darling? What about him?”

“He’s been murdered.”

“Murdered?” Her voice tilted upward.

“Is Mal there?”

“No. He hasn’t come home yet. But darling,
tell
me…
”

“Listen, there’s no time to explain it all, but a policeman’s just been here, and he’s on his way to see you. He’s found out that Mal knew Saxby in Toronto.”

“Knew him!” exclaimed Vivien. “But darling, that isn’t true. Mal only met him once at some party.”

“I know. But whatever happens, tell Mal not to mention the Duvreuxs. And that’s not all. The important thing is Chuck. Do you know where he is?”

“But of course I do. He’s back in Chicago. He sent us a wire this morning. He got tied up or something and only just made the plane. He wanted us to mail him the papers from his brief case.”

Connie was standing very close to me, listening to Vivien’s voice squawking out of the receiver. “Ask her where he was yesterday,” she said.

I said into the phone, “But he wasn’t with you at all yesterday, Vivien?”

“Of course not. I told you last night. Not even for a moment.”

Connie grabbed the phone from me. “Vivien,” she barked, “don’t tell the Lieutenant that.”

“But why not? What’s it got to do with Chuck? Why in heaven’s…?”