Part 4

Adler had shown Marion two photographs. They must therefore be somewhere in the room now. Without them the police could find no link between Adler and the past. A likely place to keep them would be a man’s wallet, and while he shrank from any contact with the lifeless figure he started toward it, only to stop when he saw the sport coat draped over the back of a chair.

He tried the outside pockets first but found only a pack of cigarettes and paper matches and two sticks of gum. But the inner pockets revealed a coat-type wallet of worn pigskin and he quickly found the two glossy prints in the center fold. He saw that they were about three inches by four, one showing the prints of four fingers of a right hand, the other a well-focused snapshot of a bareheaded man in coveralls. He took a moment to study this one and realize that his wife’s impression had been correct. The background did indeed suggest a filling station and there was some insignia on the breast pocket of the coveralls the man wore.

When he had first begun to call on Marion there had been a cabinet photograph of her first husband in her apartment. This had disappeared after their engagement, but he was as convinced now as she had been that this was an unposed snapshot of Ted Corbin. That he seemed older-looking and leaner than the remembered man in the other photograph seemed to bear out Adler’s contention that the picture had been taken recently.

A quick inspection of the inner pocket of the wallet revealed no other pictures, but he did find a Social Security card and two driver’s licenses. One had been issued in New York State and gave a Flushing address. When he saw that this was an old license he turned to the other, which gave a Conti Street address in Mobile, Alabama. He copied this address in a small notebook before he replaced the wallet, and now a new and urgent thought came to him that was at once discouraging.

If there were photographic prints there had to be negatives. If these were found they would be equally damaging. With this thought in mind he began a quick but thorough search of the room. He made himself bend over the body and pat the hip pockets. He searched the suitcase and the small blue flight bag. He went through the pockets of the gray suit that hung in the alcove and did the same thing to the blue topcoat. The drawers in the chest and the built-in vanity held nothing to interest him, and when he finally ran out of places to look, he was forced to accept the fact that there were no negatives in the room.

But if there were prints there _had_ to be negatives. So where were they?

He repeated the question aloud, a sense of frustration growing in him until he realized that time could be important and he was wasting it. He did not think he had been here long, and as he stepped to the door he told himself that no one could prove he had been here tonight. Or could they?

“How about fingerprints?” he said, half aloud.

What had he touched that might betray him? Not the bathroom door because he had opened that with his elbow. The drawer pulls? No, they were too small. The wallet was something else again and he removed it, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and replaced it gingerly. That left only the outer doorknob, and as he reached for it, handkerchief in hand, one more thought came to nag him.

Marion knew he was coming here but he felt certain he could trust her to say the right thing. But how about Roger Denham? Denham knew he was coming. If questioned, Denham would naturally say so. True, Denham could be cautioned not to give the facts as he knew them, but that might imply guilt and he did not want to be under that sort of obligation to the lawyer. Then, even as he considered the problem, a solution came to him.

The door had been unlocked when he came. All he had to do now was to release the safety catch, thereby locking it. Whoever discovered the body would have to admit that the door was locked from outside and this was exactly what he would tell the police if they ever questioned him.

“I’ll admit I came to see Adler,” he’d say to them. “I knocked and no one answered. I tried the door. It was locked. I figured he was out. There was no way of knowing when he’d be back, so I went home.”

Still with the handkerchief in his hand, he inched the door open, fixed the lock, and mentally crossed his fingers as he prepared to leave. If someone saw him now it would be too bad, but it was a chance he had to take, so he sucked in his breath and went out quickly, closing the door behind him.

The darkness seemed complete after the lighted room but he stepped close to the side of the car with the New York license plates and stood in a half-crouch until his eyes adjusted themselves. He could see nothing, hear nothing but the muted sounds of the radio. Because he did not dare walk the length of the quadrangle and expose himself to the lights of the office and the motel sign, he moved the other way, peering for an opening in the hedge at the rear and finding one, then circling around the far side of the building until he reached the elm, which cast its inky shadow over his car.

He coasted into his garage a few minutes later and came to a stop beside the station wagon. He turned out his headlights and stepped to the floor and then he had to grope in the darkness for the switch that activated the overhead bulb. In doing so he stumbled, and as he put out a hand to steady himself his fingers found the hood of the station wagon. It was then that he became aware of the warmth of the metal and, not quite believing his senses or understanding how this could be, he moved forward, his hand finding the ornamental grille in front of the radiator.

By then he was sure. There could be no mistaking the heat in the radiator and he stayed where he was as his mind raced on, disturbed and strangely frightened by his discovery and the knowledge that Marion had used the car, and recently.

But how recently? And for what purpose?

He tried to tell himself that this was not unusual, that there was some simple and innocent explanation. A trip to the drugstore for a prescription or some toiletry or a late newspaper. This, he knew, had happened before, but even as he acknowledged the possibility he remembered again the woman he had seen so briefly at the motel, the distinctive odor of perfume in the lighted bathroom. To arrest such unwanted imagery he glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that it was still only ten minutes after nine.

This, he told himself as he pulled down the overhead door and turned toward the breezeway, was all to the good, and as he crossed the area to the darkened kitchen he outlined the tentative timetable which began with his prompt arrival at Roger Denham’s place at eight o’clock.

He had been there no more than a half hour, if that. Another ten minutes, say eight-forty, had brought him to Jerry’s Tavern. Five minutes with his brandy would put him at Sam Adler’s door at eight-forty-five or a minute later. Since it was about a ten-minute drive from the tavern here, he must have been at the motel no more than twelve or fourteen minutes.

And he not only had the two pictures; he had not been seen. So what should he do about Marion? Ask her where she’d been or pretend he did not know she had been gone? This, he knew at once, would be best, and he was determined to stick with the decision as he entered the kitchen and locked the door behind him.

_6_

He did not stop in the kitchen but continued on into the lighted living room, expecting to find his wife in her chair and wondering just what he was going to say to her. Then, even as he brought some discipline to his thoughts, he realized that the effort was wasted. The room was empty and the only light came from a floor lamp by the wing chair.

For a second or two as he stood there he felt a welcome sense of relief, but it did not last when he remembered the station wagon and its warm radiator. Because he knew she must be home he moved quietly to the inner hall. From there he could see the open door of their bedroom and the darkness beyond. Still moving soundlessly, he reached the doorway and peered inside. There was enough light behind him to reveal the elongated mound her body made under the covers and the dark hair spread upon the pillow.

The fact that she had gone to bed early was, in itself, not unusual. In the last couple of months there had been several times when she had retired soon after dinner and he understood the reason for this. On those occasions he would come into their darkened room and undress as quietly as he could. Sometimes she would be awake, or would waken, and he would slip into bed beside her and hold her until she fell asleep again. At other times, knowing that she was asleep and not wanting to disturb her, he would move down the hall to the guest bedroom. The fact that the light was already on here was her way of telling him that tonight she was inviting him to sleep alone, and he stood another moment, watching for some sign of movement and wondering whether she was asleep or whether she was afraid of the questions he might ask.

The thought brought with it a sense of frustration but it gave him little alternative and he went back to the kitchen and turned on the light. The dishes they had used for their soup and salad earlier had been rinsed and stacked on the counter and he now put them into the dishwasher. He thought about making a drink and knew he did not want one. But he wanted something and he compromised by getting a beer from the refrigerator. He took this into the living room, and when he had a cigarette going he eased into the chair, his somber gaze fixed but unseeing and his mouth set grimly as his mind began again to grapple with his problems.

He made no conscious effort to think; he simply could not help himself. He found himself wondering how long it would be before Sam Adler’s body was discovered. He wondered what course the police investigation would take, and as he recalled again the story of George Freeman’s fight with the stranger he found a new motive for Adler’s death. Freeman was the quiet type that no one seemed to know too well. That he was intensely jealous where Doris Lamar was concerned seemed obvious in the light of what had happened, but he realized now that there was no point in trying to imagine what Freeman might do under extreme provocation.

Once the investigation was under way, the police would be sure to learn about the relationship between Freeman and Doris Lamar and Sam Adler. But--and this thought jarred him--they might also learn from Doris that Adler had been asking questions about him. Suppose they came here to ask other questions. Suppose someone had seen Marion tonight when she was out in the station wagon. Suppose...

This line of reasoning angered him and he swore aloud. Such disloyalty shamed him and he told himself again that Marion could not have killed Adler; she could not kill anyone. She was a completely normal, well-adjusted, and sensible girl. She always had been. The fact that her pregnancy had given her some moments of emotional turbulence could not possibly have brought her to the point of violence. This is what he told himself and this is what he believed, and yet some obscure segment of his brain that he could not control persisted in asserting itself.

He could not forget the knife that had been thrust into Sam Adler’s back. It was, he felt sure, a kitchen knife of some sort, and the obvious assumption was that it had come from the kitchenette in Adler’s room. But he could not dismiss the thought that Adler had been stabbed in the back. It was hard for him to understand why a man would use this method unless the killing was premeditated. But to a woman a kitchen knife was a familiar object. Driven by fear or desperation or a moment of temporary insanity, a woman wanting to strike back and finding such a knife handy might use it.

He lost track of time as he sat there brooding, his beer forgotten and growing flat in the glass. In an effort to curb his imagination and to submerge his present doubts and fears, he forced his mind back into the past while he considered the girl he had married, not just as he knew her since they had been together, but before that, before Ted Corbin.

She had been brought up in Westchester in a family that was socially acceptable and soundly rooted. As Marion Haskell there was enough money for a good finishing school and a college education, even though the Haskells had never been wealthy. Her father worked in Wall Street and his speculations were not always too wise, so that when a heart attack took him a month or so before Marion was to graduate from Vassar, there was not a great deal left except the house, two small insurance policies payable to her and her brother, and a large one that went to her mother, who, for the past few years, had been living with her son in Texas.

Marion had gone to work for an advertising agency in New York immediately after graduation. She had been sharing an apartment with another girl when she met Ted Corbin, who was a friend of a friend of her roommate’s. Corbin was working as a paper salesman at the time, and the factors that caused the marriage to founder after three years were the very ones that attracted Marion to him in the first place.

That Corbin was a big, good-looking, and easygoing man was at once in his favor, but what intrigued her most was the fact that he was so different from the young men she had gone out with in the past. Mostly these were Ivy League youths whose standards, conduct, and ambitions were so similar to her own. The pattern was familiar to her and she enjoyed being with them; the affairs that she had with one or another from time to time were in a minor key, but always the language they shared was the same.

Since Ted Corbin had not been trained to fit the pattern, he presented an approach that Marion found both different and exciting. For Corbin had been born and brought up in a small Pennsylvania mining town, and if his intelligence quotient was perhaps less than some, he had other skills, one of which was the ability to play a hard and aggressive type of football that was much in demand. This got him into a school in South Carolina, and by the time he had graduated he had gained some prominence in his field. He had lasted two years in the professional league, and when he realized he would never be a first-string regular, he had taken a job with a southern paper company, which eventually brought him to New York.

The fact that he was not adept or skilled in social intercourse did not seem important to Marion, even though she was aware of this. She liked his breeziness, his easy manners, his offhand ways; it was only much later that she discovered these ways were a little crude, a little too coarse for her taste. For he was, basically, an outdoor man. He liked to hunt and fish and go to the fights or the ball game. He had not read a book since he left college and she discovered that he had no intention of ever reading another. His taste in newspapers was limited to the tabloids or the sporting pages. His friends were not her friends, and even though he tried at times, the lack of communication eventually made him sullen and distant.

Friction developed early in the marriage but they tried in their own ways to combat it. But it was harder for Corbin because there was little depth to his thinking and he did not have the basic equipment to adjust to new things. Discouraged by his failure to make the marriage go, he had sought comfort in earlier friends. He drank too much and had difficulty in holding a job. There had been three jobs in three years, and he was on his way to see about a fourth when tragedy struck the aircraft. Even before that, they both knew that their marriage was finished. They had practically agreed on a separation and Marion had started to look for another job in the advertising field....

The sound that cut through Hayden’s thoughts and made him jump in the chair so startled him that for the moment he did not know whether it came from the telephone or the front door. It took him another few seconds to break the spell of nervous tension that gripped him, to glance at his watch, to understand that he had been sitting here for nearly two hours. For it was now a few minutes after eleven, and as the sound was repeated and he came to his feet, he understood that whoever had rung the doorbell had not come here on a social call. He moved quickly then, the trepidation growing in him as his pulse quickened.

He did not know the two men who faced him as he opened the door, but he saw that one was tall and lean-looking in his trench coat, the other somewhat shorter and more heavily built. It was the tall one who made the introduction.

“Mr. Hayden?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lieutenant Garvey of the State Police.... This is County Detective Ball from the State’s Attorney’s office.”

Hayden’s acknowledgment was a mumbled “Hello,” and although he had already considered the possibility of such a call, he was glad the light was at his back. For in those first moments he could feel his features stiffen as the blood drained from his face. He had the impression that the shadowed eyes beneath the hat brims were intent upon his reactions and he concentrated on making his voice sound reasonably surprised but not disconcerted.

“What can I do for you?”

“We’re sorry to bother you at this hour,” Garvey said, “but we need some information and we thought you might help us. May we come in?”

“Certainly.” Hayden stepped back and waved them toward the living room. “In there. Take off your coats.”

They removed their hats and unbuttoned their coats but did not take them off. They sat down on the divan and he could see now that Garvey was in his late thirties, a confident-looking man with a prominent jaw, deep-set gray eyes, and short brown hair. Ball was older and more round in the face. His head was nearly bald on top and Hayden was at once aware of the dark eyes which were steady, watchful, and inquisitive.

“I was just having a beer before I went to bed,” he said, and took a swallow of the stale brew to prove it. “Can I offer you anything?”

“No thanks,” they said.

“We’ll try not to keep you up,” Garvey said. “But we’d like to find out what you know about a man named Adler.”

_7_

John Hayden took another slow and deliberate swallow of the beer and reached for a cigarette. He knew then that he was as ready as he ever would be for the questions and it pleased him to see that the flame from their table lighter was steady when he held it up. He could still feel his pulse but it was no longer racing, and he frowned deliberately at the end of the cigarette before he replied.

“Adler?” he said on a note of puzzlement.

“You don’t know him?” Ball asked.

“I don’t think so. At least I don’t remember anyone by that name.”

“He was staying at The Shady Maple Motel.”

Hayden frowned again for their benefit. “What about him? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“Not any more.”

“Someone stuck a knife in his back,” Garvey said. “According to the medical examiner he probably died somewhere between eight and nine o’clock tonight.”

Hayden heard them out and then, nothing showing in his face, he rose and moved over to close the door to the inner hall.

“My wife went to bed early,” he said. “She’s four months pregnant and I’d like her to get her rest.” He came back and sat down. He looked right at them. “I don’t know anyone named Adler,” he said, “but I’m curious to know why you came here at all.”

“We’ve been making a lot of inquiries, Mr. Hayden,” Ball said. “From things we’ve heard we got the impression that you _did_ know Adler.”

“To the best of my knowledge I never laid eyes on the man.”

“George Freeman--he’s managing The Shady Maple--” Garvey began.

“I know him.”

“--found the body around nine-thirty, or so he says. He couldn’t tell us much about Adler except that he was a stranger who registered yesterday afternoon.”

“We started to check on him,” Ball said. “We put some men on the main street to see what we could find. You know Lee Cramer at the filling station, don’t you?”

“Know him well.”

“He remembered Adler. He had some conversation with him yesterday afternoon and Adler asked if he knew you. He asked where you lived and Cramer told him. Now why would Adler do that if he didn’t intend to get in touch with you?”

“Cramer told me about that conversation,” Hayden said and was pleased that his voice sounded so steady and unruffled. “He described the man but he didn’t mention any name.”

Garvey, who had been examining a small, leather-covered notebook, looked up. “We made some inquiries at Jerry’s Tavern,” he said. “The way we get it you stopped in there twice tonight.”

“That’s right.”

“You had some conversation with the waitress there--Doris Lamar--”

“That was around a quarter of six.”

“Mind telling us the substance of that conversation?”

“It was mostly about her and George Freeman.”

“Did she tell you that a man named Sam Adler had been making some inquiries about you?”

Hayden hesitated but not for long.

“Yes, now that I stop to think of it. She said she and George had had an argument about something. Adler made a play for her the night before and she decided to put Freeman in his place. They went dancing later at the Log Cabin and Freeman came in and took a swing at Adler and Adler beat him to the punch. When I saw Freeman he was wearing dark glasses. He looked as if he had a shiner.”

“He did,” Ball said. “It was a beaut.”

“So Adler asked Lee Cramer if he knew you and where you lived,” Garvey continued. “Cramer told him. Tonight Doris Lamar told you the same thing. But you still say you don’t know Adler?”

“That’s right.”

“He didn’t come here to see you?”

“He did not.”

“And you have no idea what he wanted?”

“No.”

“Where were you this evening?” Ball asked.

Hayden suddenly found it difficult to meet the unremitting steadiness of the county detective’s dark gaze. The uneasiness was growing in him now and for some reason his thoughts moved off on a tangent and he found himself comparing these two with the detectives he had seen on television and in the movies. He had never been questioned by a policeman about anything, but the detectives he had seen on the screen were hard-nosed, tough-talking characters who threw their weight around and wore down suspects by intimidation and threats. In contrast, these two men spoke quietly and in matter-of-fact tones. They were polite, and at the moment well mannered, but he understood that they would be relentless in their pursuit of any information they thought pertinent.

He thought about the two photographs he had in his pocket and was thankful that they could not know about them. There had been moments of misgivings when he left the motel room, but he was glad now that he had acted the way he did. They might pin him down on this or that, but without those pictures which linked him and Marion with the past there was no motive--unless they somehow located the original negatives.

“I had an appointment with my attorney at eight o’clock.”

“Who would that be?” Garvey asked.

“Roger Denham,” Hayden said and mentioned the address.

“You went to his house?”

“That’s right.”

“When did you leave?”

“I’d say around eight-thirty.”

“Then what?”

“I stopped at Jerry’s Tavern.”

“For a drink?” Ball asked in his customary even tones.

“Naturally.”

“What did you order?”

“A double brandy and water,” Hayden said, and even as he spoke he knew that the announcement would bring forth additional comment.

“Was that the usual thing for you at that time of the evening?” Garvey asked.

“No. I felt like a double brandy and I ordered it. I drank it and drove home.”

“Jerry said that when you left you started across the street toward the motel,” Ball said.