Shadow of Guilt (9 page)

Vivien was getting hysterical. I snatched the receiver back from Connie, dreading what I was going to ask but knowing it had to be done.

“Vivien,” I said, “Mal still has that gun, doesn’t he?”

“Gun?”

“The automatic he bought after you were married?”

“Why, yes, I think so. I’m sure. I—”

“He still keeps it in the drawer between your beds?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Go look and see whether it’s still there.”

“George,” said Connie. “My God—George.”

There was a silence at the other end of the wire. Then Vivien said, “Are you out of your mind? Why should I look?”

“Just go and look.”

“Oh, all right. I’m right here in the bedroom. I can reach over and…” Once again there was silence, then Vivien gave a gasp. “It’s not there.”

I felt that queasiness again. “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Mal couldn’t have put it anywhere else?”

“No. I’m certain. That’s the place he said it always ought to be.” I knew it would only be seconds before she caught on. “My God, Chuck came here into the bedroom on Saturday night. George, you don’t mean Chuck took it?”

Connie made another wild grab for the telephone. I almost had to struggle with her.

“He must have taken it,” Vivien was saying. “That’s what he was doing. But why? It’s impossible. You can’t imagine he—he killed Don Saxby? He hardly even knew him.”

“Ala went off with Saxby last weekend,” I said. “She thought she was in love with him. She told Chuck she wasn’t going through with the wedding. That’s why he was the way he was. Listen, Vivien, this is terribly important. When the Lieutenant comes, don’t either of you mention the gun and swear till you’re blue in the face that Chuck was with you all day Sunday.”

“But… but, oh, George, I can’t face it without Mal. I simply can’t. You’ve got to come over.”

“How can we? The moment we showed up, Lieutenant Trant would see through it all in a second.”

“But… but…”

“If it is the gun, then it’s hopeless anyway. Trant’s bound to trace it. But just do the best you can. Stall. And call us the moment he’s gone.”

“But George,” she was moaning, “George—”

“I’m sorry, Vivien. There’s nothing else to do.”

I put down the receiver and turned to Connie. She was gazing straight ahead of her with an expression of such naked despair that it was painful to look at her. Then, after a long pause, she said, “So Chuck took the gun.”

“It looks that way.”

She spun on me almost angrily. “You knew last night and you didn’t tell me?”

“Of course I didn’t know. But last night on the phone Vivien told me about his being in her bedroom. It was only when Trant talked about the gun that I got the idea.”

There was a little chair by the phone. She dropped down into it. Her hands were clenched together in her lap. “But if… if he took it…” She looked up at me. “George, did you notice anything about him yesterday?”

“You mean the way he looked?”

A shiver ran through her body. “Like Sally.” She got up again abruptly. “That can’t happen, can it? Something like that? It can’t be latent for years, never giving a sign and then…” She stopped as if she didn’t dare put into words what she dreaded. “George, if he took the gun… if he went, like that, to Don…”

“I know,” I said.

“And Vivien’s hopeless. She’s never going to stand up to that Lieutenant. She… oh, George, what are we going to do?”

I was painfully conscious of her suffering and of her need for comfort. But, as I put my arm around her, all I felt was a smoldering resentment, resentment of this demanding grief, resentment of Ala, and above all, resentment against the circumstances which were entangling me so relentlessly back into a life from which I’d thought I was escaping.

If there’d been something we could do, it would have helped, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing but to wait. I made her sit down on a couch. I sat down with her, plagued by inadequacy and guilt, longing for Tobago—no, not Tobago, some nonexistent tropical isle thousands of miles from anywhere, where there would be no one but Eve and me.

Ala came back in about half an hour. We told her, at least I did. Connie just stood watching her, her face an icy, implacable mask. It wasn’t easy for Ala to pretend not to know as much as she did, in fact, know, but once again she handled it with a smoothness which was almost shocking to me. It was only when I told her about Chuck and the gun that the veneer cracked.

“No,” she gasped. “No, it can’t be true.”

“It’s true,” said Connie.

Ala turned to her. “Then—then you’re trying to say…?”

“We’re not trying to say anything. We’re only telling you the facts.” Connie paused. “Perhaps you have something to say.”

“Me?” repeated Ala. “Why me?”

“Do you have to ask?”

“But George said that Chuck—”

“George said that no one knows where Chuck was yesterday afternoon and that Vivien’s gun is missing. That’s all he said. But if the police find out about it, you know what they’re going to think. And if the gun does turn out to be Mal’s, you’re going to have a lot on your conscience, aren’t you?” The tone of my wife’s voice was bitterly accusatory. I should have realized, of course, that this was bound to happen. Connie’s love for Chuck had always been the deepest reality of her existence, while her feeling for Ala was something artificial which she’d forced upon herself. Now that Chuck was in danger, it was Ala, inevitably, who had become the enemy, Ala, the pseudo Corliss whose irresponsible “Hadley” behavior had brought on the disaster.

They stood there, the two of them, ignoring me, watching each other with a deadly intensity.

It was Ala who finally spoke. In a thin, tight voice she said, “Would you kindly explain what you mean by that remark?”

“What remark?”

“You know what remark. Why should I have anything on my conscience?”

“My God,” said Connie, “you can stand there and say that? You?”

“Why not? What’s it got to do with me? Is there any law that says I’ve got to be in love with Chuck? I thought I could marry him. I thought it was the best thing to do. Then—then when Don came along… I know now what he was. Of course I know and I know what a fool I made of myself. But if Chuck was crazy enough to grab up Uncle Mal’s gun and dash around and shoot him… what’s that got to do with me? I’m not responsible for his actions, am I?”

As I watched them glaring at each other, I could have banged their heads together.

Ala had spun around to me. “George, she knows I know it’s terrible about Chuck. Can’t you stop her picking on me just for once?”

“Picking on her!” echoed Connie. “At a time like this, she can—”

That’s when the telephone rang. I jumped to answer it. It was Mal Ryson, his voice sounding thick, almost incoherent. “George, will you please come over here? Right away?”

“What is it?” I said. “What’s happened?”

“Please come. That’s all. Just come, all of you.”

He hung up. Connie said, “Was it Vivien?”

“Mal,” I said. “He wants us to go right over. All of us.”

“All of us?” exclaimed Ala. “Do I have to go?”

As I looked at her sulky, pouting face, I realized what a total stranger she had become to me. Did she have to go? What did she think this all was?

“Yes,” I said. “Oddly enough, you do have to come. And you’re coming right now.”

We took a taxi to the Rysons’ house on Sutton Place, three dissociated bodies, each infinitely isolated from the other. When we got out at the front door, all the lights downstairs were on. We went up the steps. I rang the bell. Almost immediately the door opened, and Mal Ryson was standing on the threshold. Mal had always seemed to me to be the stodgiest, most placid person I knew, but now he looked about twenty years older—gray-faced, with an old man’s sag to his shoulders.

“Lieutenant Trant’s just left,” he said. “While he was here, a call came through from headquarters. They’ve traced the ownership of the gun that killed Don Saxby. It was my gun.” Ala gave a little gasp. Connie clutched my arm. We all crowded into the hallway. Mal closed the door behind us clumsily, as if his fingers had to think out each separate move.

“And Vivien was frightened,” he was saying. “The Lieutenant went on questioning her. And she got frightened. She didn’t know what she was doing. I know she didn’t, but she told him that she’d seen Chuck in our bedroom on Saturday night. She told him that Chuck must have taken the gun, and then she admitted that we had no idea where he’d been all day Sunday.”

I’d known, of course I’d known, that Vivien would lose her head. Mal came toward us, walking very slowly. I thought his knees were going to buckle under him. He reached Connie and put a hand on her arm for support.

“You’ve got to explain, Connie. I—I don’t understand what Vivien says. What is it? What’s been happening? They’re going to pick Chuck up in Chicago. The Lieutenant says that there’ll be no difficulty about extradition. They’ll be bringing him back tomorrow, he says, for further questioning.”

His eyes, vague and dull, moved from one of our faces to the other as if he were searching there for some evidence of unreality to prove that he was dreaming it all.

“But why, Connie? How can they possibly think that Chuck took that gun and—and killed Don Saxby?”

Ala took an impulsive step toward him. All the sulky defiance was gone. Her lips were quivering. Her eyes were agonized with shame and remorse, and she wasn’t acting, I could tell. The Ala I knew and loved had re-emerged from the deviously self-justifying stranger.

“Uncle Mal,” she cried. “Oh, poor Uncle Mal, you’ll never forgive me—never…”

We went into the living room. Everything was different. Vivien must have been rioting around with a new decorator. And there she was, half hysterical, fluttering all over the place, dramatizing her “ordeal.” I’d never realized before that Connie disliked her, but now her expression was a dead giveaway.

While Ala, very pale and contrite, sat on a stiff-backed chair, Connie and I explained to Mal everything which I’d only sketched in to Vivien on the phone. It was, of course, far too late to think up any way of shielding Chuck now, and, once we’d told all there was to tell, I decided it was kinder to Mal if we left. He was wonderful about it, very dignified and polite, but his love for Chuck was as basic if less demonstrative than Connie’s, and I knew he could only think that Ala had behaved like a floozie and that I, in encouraging her, had been almost as irresponsible.

As Ala and Connie and I drove home in a taxi, I wintrily contemplated what lay ahead of us. By now they’d be bringing Chuck back from Chicago. Whether he was guilty or not—and how could he possibly be innocent?—our clumsy attempts at lying to Lieutenant Trant would have gone for nothing at all. Tomorrow the papers would be screaming their heads off about us:
banker’s son held in murder of socialite fiancée’s seducer.
Tomorrow we’d all be public figures, bound tightly together against the great public. I’d be a part of the clan, too, I who had rejected everything Corliss, I who… My longing for Eve and the realization of her inaccessibility came simultaneously.

It seems to me that we drove home from the Rysons’ in total silence and spent the rest of the evening in total silence, too.

Next morning the papers were almost as bad as I had feared they would be. They announced in headlines of varying degrees of sensationalism that Chuck Ryson, son of Malcolm Ryson, the distinguished banker, had been detained by the police in Chicago and flown back to New York for further questioning in regard to the murder of Donald Saxby. Although by now Trant must have guessed how deeply involved Ala was, there was still no proof and consequently there was no direct mention of any relationship between her and Don. She figured heavily, however, as Chuck’s “heiress fiancée,” whose “nuptials” were to take place next month at a “fashionable East Side church.” There was even a picture of her with me, smiling gayly, her arm around me, at some social function which had left no recollection with me at all.

Reporters pestered me at the office and presumably were pestering Connie and Ala at home. Lew Parker took me out to lunch. He knew the Rysons and admired Mal. He was too tactful to show how curious he was, but that didn’t make lunch any less of an effort. And all the time I was waiting for what was going to come next. What would it be? A call from the police? Or would Lieutenant Trant appear in person, strolling into my office with that quiet, disconcerting smile of his?

What happened in fact was Mal. I’d got home around six. Just after dinner, Connie and Ala and I were sitting in the living room, when Mary came in and announced Mr. Ryson. Ala couldn’t face him. She scuttled upstairs. The moment he walked into the room, I knew the news was bad. Being Mal, he was still trying to look calm and distinguished, but his eyes were more than enough to give him away.

“I’ve seen him,” he said.

“Chuck?” cried Connie. “Where is he?”

“They’ve got him at Centre Street. I’ve just been with him.”

He had moved to a chair and was standing by it with his hand on its back. For a moment neither Connie nor I could bring ourselves to ask what had to be asked. Then Connie did it.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing,” said Mal. “He admitted he took the gun out of the drawer. He did that, I—I imagine, for my sake. He didn’t want me as the owner of the gun, to get into any trouble, but apart from that…”

I suppose I had been trying to believe that miraculously Chuck would have an explanation for himself. I wasn’t going to be able to believe that any more.

“But, Mal,” Connie said, “you mean he hasn’t told the police anything?”

“Not a thing. That Lieutenant says he’s been questioning him for hours, but he just sits there, refusing to answer. When we were alone together, I thought, I was sure he’d—he’d talk to me, his own father, but he didn’t. I hired a lawyer for him at once. Macguire. He’s supposed to be the best criminal lawyer in town. But when I told him, he didn’t even seem to take it in. I can’t understand. I just can’t understand. He didn’t do it. I know he didn’t do it. Whatever the—the incentive, I know that Chuck would never…”