Carter felt that Ostreicher suspected him very strongly, had all along, and that he was so sure, he didn’t have to hurry. Carter swallowed and glanced at Hazel.
Hazel was leaning forward with her arms on her knees, staring at the floor. Suddenly she looked up at Ostreicher. “Just how long do you really think it will take to find who did it?”
Ostreicher took his time answering, then it was the same old answer, “Maybe two or three days. Maybe even less. Let’s see what Gawill’s banks show tomorrow. We’ll have to look into yours, too, Mr. Carter.”
Carter nodded. He stood up as Ostreicher did.
“And of course we’ll get on to Gawill about the dope,” Ost-reicher said. “Grasso might know something, Gawill’s boss. He really doesn’t seem to have any idea Gawill planned Sullivan’s murder or had anything to do with it, but maybe Gawill’s just being very careful about that. Gawill and Grasso are very close—personally, I mean. Chummy.” Ostreicher rubbed his chin and stared at a wall for a moment, then looked at Carter and smiled. “Back to work for us tonight. Got to look at Grasso’s house and also O’Brien’s for the dope. What kind of container was it in?”
“A cardboard box about two feet square,” Carter said. “The ampoules were lying on cotton in layers.”
“Probably in mayonnaise jars now,” Ostreicher murmured, “or liquid silver-polish jars.” He chuckled. “Off we go, Charles.”
Timmy came in when the apartment door closed. Carter went to pour him the promised chocolate milk, while Hazel tried to answer his questions. The answer to the main question was still missing. But Timmy was very interested in O’Brien. Timmy sat on the sofa, holding his chocolate milk. “Maybe they know O’Brien did it and they’re just waiting for something very definite.”
Hazel looked tiredly at Carter. “I don’t know where else we can go with this tonight.”
Carter didn’t know what to say, either. Timmy had seen television shows in which the detectives kept back what they knew until they could let it all fall with a wallop on the guilty person. That was what he was groping for now, that kind of situation. “It’s too early to tell anything now, Timmy,” Carter said.
In bed, Carter tried to put his arm around Hazel, to hold her while she fell asleep, but she twisted slowly, with the tension of someone wide awake, and said, “Sorry, I can’t. I can’t stand to be touched right now.”
“Hazel, I love you.” Carter’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “Can’t we just fall asleep together?”
But she wouldn’t, and neither of them slept for a long while.
24
“Can we have a word with you, Mrs. Carter?”
A camera flashed.
“Mrs. Carter,” said the nervous-looking reporter with a smile, “just one question. About Sullivan—”
“Just shove off,” Carter said.
There were three of them, and two had cameras.
“Don’t touch me!” Hazel said, pulling her arm from the grip of the nervous young man.
Carter put his arm around her and they walked quickly toward Hazel’s car, which was about six yards away.
“Get in. I’ll drop you at your office,” Hazel said.
Carter got in. He practically had to close the door on one of the reporters’ hands.
Hazel drove off.
“It’s a wonder they haven’t come before this,” Carter said.
“They were calling up yesterday—three or four times. I just didn’t bother mentioning it.”
Carter said nothing, knowing Hazel was ashamed, angry, and that she would turn her anger against him as much as the reporters, if he tried to talk to her. But after a few moments, he said quietly, “You don’t have to take me all the way to the office. We’ve got rid of them now.”
And Hazel swerved to a curb as soon as she could, and stopped the car.
“Thanks,” he said, getting out. “See you later, darling.” No use the “Chin up,” even the “I love you,” that he had an impulse to say to her. She was ashamed because her affair with Sullivan would be known now to everyone in her office, ashamed, too, because the newspapers and the radio were this morning blazoning the fact that her husband was an ex-convict.
Carter walked into his office and tensed at the sight of Elizabeth at the front desk, the redheaded girl who had told the police he had left at 5:20, not 5:30 p.m. on Friday. “Morning, Elizabeth,” Carter said.
“Morning, Mr. Carter. Uh—” She slid out from her desk and stood up. She was tall and slender, nearly as tall as Carter in her high heels. Her young face was serious and intense. “I hope you’re not annoyed by what I said to the police. They were questioning me very carefully, down to the minute. I just said what I remembered and what I thought was true.”
“No, it’s perfectly okay,” Carter said, smiling slightly. “Nothing to worry about.” He walked on to his office.
Mr. Jenkins, a tall, gray-haired man, was walking down the green-carpeted corridor. “Good morning, Mr. Carter.”
“Morning, sir,” said Carter.
Mr. Jenkins paused. “Come in a moment, will you?”
Carter went with him into his office, and Mr. Jenkins closed the door.
“I’m sorry about this awful trouble,” Mr. Jenkins said. “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know.” Carter looked back into Mr. Jenkins’s eyes. “However—I understand the difficulties of taking me on here in the first place, so if you think it might be better if I resigned, I’m quite agreeable, Mr. Jenkins.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of that as yet,” Mr. Jenkins replied, looking a bit embarrassed. “But you’re supposed to go to Detroit this Thursday. You can’t if the police haven’t cleared it up, can you? I presume they’re still talking to you?” He looked at Carter as if in the next seconds he could determine whether Carter had done the killing or not.
“That’s true. But—I thought I could write up my ideas and maybe Mr. Butterworth could go in my place.”
Mr. Jenkins sighed and opened his arms in an impatient gesture. “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.— Have you any idea who did this?”
Carter hesitated. “I’d guess someone around Gawill, Sullivan’s old enemy from years back. But I don’t know, Mr. Jenkins.”
Mr. Jenkins looked at him wordlessly for a moment, and Carter knew he was thinking that Carter’s wife had been “intimate” with the man who was slain, and what an odd situation it was that the man who was murdered had recommended Carter for his job and that they had been presumably the best of friends.
When Carter had entered his own office and closed his door, it occurred to him that Mr. Jenkins had not asked the obvious question, “You’re completely innocent, of course? You had nothing at all to do with this?” There could be only one reason why Mr. Jenkins had not said something like that. Mr. Jenkins thought he might be guilty.
Carter had been prepared for a sticky conversation with Butterworth that morning, but for some reason Butterworth was not in the office. He began to type up his notes on the Detroit factory. Again and again his mind drifted to Timmy, Timmy in his school on 19th Street now, being asked questions by the kids, being stared at, being jibed at because his father had been in prison; and of course the kids wouldn’t miss the story that Timmy’s mother had been sleeping with another man. Hazel had said once, “Timmy’s so much better now that we’re in New York, because the kids here don’t know anything about the prison business.” Now that was all going to break open again.
Carter’s telephone rang just after 11.
“Mr. Carter, this is Ostreicher. I wonder can you come down to the station for a few minutes? It’s most important . . .”
Carter told Elizabeth that he had to go out for a while, and that he might be back before lunch, but he was not sure. He wondered if she had listened to the conversation an
d knew he was off to see the police? Probably.
Ostreicher’s precinct station was in the East 50s. Carter walked the five blocks. He was shown by a middle-aged officer to a room down a hall.
“Come in, Mr. Carter,” said Ostreicher, getting up from his desk.
In a large, file-lined office were Gawill and O’Brien and two men and a woman whom Carter did not know. Carter nodded to Gawill, who did not return the nod. Gawill was slumped sullenly in his chair with his fingers locked across his stomach.
“Mr. Carter, I think you know Mr. Gawill. This is Mr. O’Brien, and this is Mr. and Mrs. Ferres and Mr. Devlin. These people live in Mr. Sullivan’s building.”
Carter nodded and murmured, “How do you do?” He had taken his hat off. The three people from Mr. Sullivan’s house were eyeing him carefully.
“Do any of you remember seeing Mr. Carter in Mr. Sullivan’s house? At any time?” Ostreicher asked.
The woman answered first, shaking her head. “No.”
The men also gave negative answers.
“These people happened to be in at the time of the murder,” Ostreicher said, “and they were kind enough to come down this morning to—on the off chance they might have seen any of you going into Mr. Sullivan’s building on Friday evening.” Ostreicher’s glance took in Gawill, O’Brien, and Carter. His tone was as usual brisk and pleasant. “It was Mrs. Ferres who heard something that sounded like a body falling to the floor at what she thinks was six o’clock or a couple of minutes before. She heard nothing after that, no sound of running steps or anything.”
Carter avoided O’Brien’s eyes, and he felt that O’Brien avoided his also. O’Brien was in a too bright blue pinstripe suit, his hair shiny with brilliantine.
“Mr. Carter, have you seen Mr. O’Brien before?” Ostreicher asked. He was still standing behind his desk.
Carter looked at O’Brien briefly. O’Brien was staring at his own shoes now. “I think I met him one night at Gawill’s apartment.”
“When was that?”
“About ten days ago, I think,” Carter answered. Had Gawill and O’Brien denied it, Carter wondered? Their faces told nothing.
“Have you seen him since?” asked Ostreicher.
“No,” Carter said.
“Have you seen Mr. Carter since, Mr. O’Brien?” Ostreicher asked.
“Nope,” said O’Brien, glancing up briefly.
“Did you talk much to each other the night you met?”
O’Brien didn’t answer.
“I don’t think I said a thing to him,” Carter said, “except ‘How do you do?’”
“Anthony didn’t stay long that night, not after Phil came,” Gawill put in.
Ostreicher nodded. He turned around and opened a closet behind his desk and took something from a shelf. It was the Greek marble foot, a left foot. He placed it with both hands in the center of his desk, watching Gawill, O’Brien, and Carter as he did so. “This is the murder weapon,” Ostreicher said. “It was held like this, someone’s hand around the narrow part on the instep here. Mr. Sullivan was probably struck with the toes of this.”
Gawill stared at the foot with an air of indifference and boredom. O’Brien’s eyes widened as he looked at it. His rather stupid face looked merely blank.
“Mr. Carter, let me see you pick this up,” said Ostreicher.
Carter moved closer to Ostreicher’s desk, and extended his left hand, changed to his right, and picked up the foot with his thumb under the arch and his fingers curved around the outside of the foot. He felt pain in his right thumb as he lifted it. His grip was not tight.
“Turn that over, please. Just turn your wrist,” Ostreicher said, illustrating with a turn of his own wrist.
Carter turned his wrist. On the bottom of the foot, on the marble peppered with time and abrasion, was a circle a good inch away from where his third finger rested, no doubt the spot where the fingerprint had been.
“Um-m,” said Ostreicher, and moved Carter’s fingers until the third finger rested on the spot, then shook the marble foot to feel Carter’s grip.
Carter then put the foot down on the desk.
Ostreicher glanced at him, then looked at O’Brien. “Mr. O’Brien, would you oblige?”
O’Brien got up obediently and picked up the foot from the same sole-on-the-desk position it had been in when Carter picked it up. With a thumb under the arch was the most likely way anyone would pick up the thing, because what nubbin remained of the ankle was uneven and slanting inward toward the arch side of the foot. Ostreicher turned O’Brien’s hand over. O’Brien’s middle finger rested on the circle, Carter saw. O’Brien had bigger hands than Carter, but Carter also realized he had taken a big hard grip on the marble that night. Ostreicher made no comment on O’Brien’s grip, but turned to the three occupants of Sullivan’s house.
“I don’t think there’s any reason for you people to stay any longer,” Ostreicher said. “My thanks to all of you for coming down. It’s been very useful.”
It had been no help at all, Carter thought. The people stirred in their chairs and got up with a slight air of reluctance, as if they were being asked to leave before the best part of the show. Ost-reicher walked out in the hall with them, but immediately came back and closed the door.
“Now. Well—” Ostreicher sat sideways against his desk, and pressed his palms together. “One of you here is guilty and we’re going to find out which.”
“If you’re including me, you don’t know your business,” Gawill said with anger.
Ostreicher ignored him, and smiled a little at Carter. “Mr. Carter, your alibi is not exactly airtight: You had enough time—especially if you took a taxi instead of a bus—to get to Sullivan’s apartment Friday afternoon, stay five minutes or even ten, and take another taxi home. It doesn’t take ten minutes to kill a man with a thing like this, does it?”
Such polite accusation was new to Carter, quite unlike anything he’d experienced in prison. “No, of course not,” he said.
Ostreicher looked at his wristwatch, then turned to Gawill. “Mr. Gawill, any idea why your boss isn’t choosing to turn up this morning?”
“No idea,” Gawill said. “Maybe he had to go do something in one of his apartments, who knows?”
“Like make sure his dope’s still there or something?” Ost-reicher said, frowning, and set his strong jaw, the first sign of temper he had shown. “He doesn’t spend much time at the pipe factory, does he?”
“That’s his business where he spends his time,” Gawill said.
Ostreicher turned to Carter again. “You have found no reason, I take it, to change any of the statements you’ve made to me about your actions on Friday night?”
“No,” said Carter.
“Would you take off your jacket, please, Mr. Carter?” Ost-reicher was moving toward his closet again. “I’d like to give you a lie-detector test.” He was getting the machine from a shelf.
To Carter’s surprise, Gawill and O’Brien were not asked to leave and he was not taken to another room. A rubber plate with a cord to it was attached to his bare chest, more rubber tied to his arm for his blood pressure, and then Ostreicher began his questioning. The time of everything, leaving the office, the bus ride, the walking, the newspaper buying, the arrival home when Hazel had been there. Then the questions in a different form: “You didn’t take a bus down to Thirty-eighth and then go to see David Sullivan Friday?” Carter did not think his heart beat very much faster. A little faster, yes. But he found himself able to answer the questions mechanically, as if he didn’t care, didn’t consider them very important. And that was exactly it, he thought, he really didn’t care too much what happened to himself. “You didn’t say to Sullivan, ‘I’ve had enough of your two-facedness, your hypocrisy,’ something like that, then pick up that marble foot from one of hi
s shelves and—”
“No,” Carter replied.
“Mr. Carter, you’re a surprisingly cool man—today. Cold.”
Carter sighed and looked at Ostreicher. He felt Gawill’s and O’Brien’s eyes on him. He had not once looked their way, though he was almost facing them.
“In your conversation with your wife Tuesday night, were you just as cold?”
“No,” Carter said.
“Did you ask her to stop seeing Sullivan?”
Carter was suddenly painfully annoyed by Gawill’s and O’Brien’s presence. He squirmed in the straight chair. “I asked her if she could. Or if she wanted to.”
“You were asking her to make a choice then. ‘Choose me or else.’ Just how did you put it, Mr. Carter?”
“Not that way,” Carter said, looking at Ostreicher. “There was no ‘or else.’”
“What answer did your wife really give you?”
“She gave—what I said,” Carter said carefully. “She said she didn’t know what she could or couldn’t do.”
Ostreicher smiled impatiently. “That was an unsatisfactory answer from your point of view, wasn’t it?”
Carter loathed the probing now. It was like Dr. Cassini’s steel probe, groping clumsily around in a wound for a piece of shiv blade. “It was not as unsatisfactory as you seem to think.”
“Mr. Carter, I submit that you had ample cause to hate Mr. Sullivan and to want him out of the way. You had ample cause last week to become murderously angry.”
Carter sat motionless.
“What would you say if I told you that I’m going to prove you guilty beyond a shadow of doubt?” Ostreicher came close to Carter, wagging a finger.
But even Ostreicher’s attack was not real, Carter felt. It was like something Ostreicher was enacting in a play. When the play was over in a few minutes, they’d start acting like themselves again, like people not connected with each other. “I’d say, ‘go ahead and try,’” Carter said.