After the First Death

10

ON THE SUBWAY RIDE BACK DOWNTOWN I TRIED TO THINK OF something clever to do with what was left of the night. Nothing suggested itself. The night gave me far greater freedom of movement, but one could neither drop in on people nor telephone them at that hour, so that I was left with the freedom to go anywhere and no place to go.

So I went back to my hotel and made more lists. Russell J. Stone. There had to be a way to find out something about him, but how? I would sleep on it. Warren Hayden-he did look out of the picture, it appearing highly unlikely that he would fly in from Peru, cut little Robin’s throat, and then resume his search for the lost city of the Incas, or whatever men sought in the Peruvian wilderness. His actual presence in Peru would need confirmation, and I would find a way to check it out but meanwhile he looked safe.

Pete Landis. He remained on the list with nothing I had learned to confirm him or clear him as the killer. Doug didn’t know him, so there had been no point in bringing up his name.

Don Fischer. I saw his name on the list from before and couldn’t imagine what it was doing there. I had bought an insurance policy from him. What did that have to do with murder? I closed my eyes and saw a pleasant-faced young man with thick glasses and thick eyebrows that had grown together to form one continuous ridge of brow. Gwen’s lover? My enemy? Inconceivable on both counts.

I solemnly crossed off Don Fischer’s name. And began to laugh, because the only suspect-if such a term were advised in my investigations-the only suspect thus far eliminated was a man of whom I had not consciously thought at all since first writing down his name.

Penn’s progress. At this happy rate, I could spend all my days writing down the names of strangers and all my nights crossing them off again, knitting a Penelope’s shawl of suspicion rather than the more purposeful tapestry of Madame DeFarge.

I put my lists away. They bored me. I turned on the television set, and watched several movies which differed each from the other by the number of times the word late appeared in their general titles. In the middle of one of these I turned off the set and got out of my clothes and went to bed.

“Mrs. Stone?”

“Yes.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Stone. I’m Curt Amory of Industrial Research Corp. I’ve a few questions in regard to a survey we’re preparing, and if you’ll give me a minute or two of your time I’ll be able to send you a free gift for your troubles. Could you tell me, for a starter, approximately how many hours a week you and your family watch television?”

“Oh, well, we watch about an hour a night, I suppose, but then I watch now and then in the day time-”

I didn’t much listen. I asked a few more routine questions, a handkerchief stretched over the mouthpiece of the telephone-I had read that this changes one’s voice, though I honestly don’t know why it should.

Then, “Now some statistics, Mrs. Stone. How large is your family?”

“Three of us. Myself, my husband, and our son.”

I hadn’t known about the child.

“Are you native Californians?”

“No. I moved here about four years ago.”

“And Mr. Stone?”

“Moved here ten years ago from Chicago.”

“And his occupation?”

“He’s purchasing director for Interpublic Chemical.”

I went on, picking up a few more facts to help me trace Russell Stone. As the interview progressed there was more and more space before Gwen’s answers, as if she wondered why Industrial Research Corp. was interested in such a mixed bag of trivia. Then the operator cut. in to announce that my three minutes were up, and at that point my once-wife tipped.

“Who is this?”

“Thanks very much for your cooperation,” I said smoothly, “and you’ll be receiving your free gift in the mail, Mrs. Stone-”

“Alex? Is that you? Alex, what’s going on?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Who is this? Alex? I don’t-”

I replaced the receiver and left the booth.

In an irrational way, I was pleased that Gwen had at last recognized my voice. After all, I had been married to the woman for quite some time. And even then, while we were married, I had occasionally found myself thinking of her as rather like those huge new glass and steel apartment buildings. One could live in one of those apartments for fifty years, and the day one finally moved out the apartment would shake itself utterly free of every trace of one’s occupancy; it would be as though one had never been there at all.

So it often seemed with Gwen. I was sure I had made no impression upon her, that in the process of divorcing me she went through the rooms and corridors of her mind, wiping away any traces I might have left therein, tidying up carefully and readying the rooms for the next occupant. I found it startling, for example, that Russell Stone had been able to gift her with a child; if ever a woman were constitutionally designed to be barren, that woman was Gwen.

Perhaps they had adopted the child. I found myself wanting to believe as much.

I stopped at a Cobb’s Corner and had a cup of coffee at the counter. The telephone conversation played again through my mind and I smiled at the inanity of it. A survey indeed. Market research has had an extraordinary effect upon the American public. The average citizen is so well accustomed to answering any number of idiot questions about himself that he has become quite incapable of telling strangers to mind their own damned business. Virtually anyone will reveal virtually anything about himself once he is convinced that the questions are purposeless, designed only to facilitate the waste of corporate time and money.

Would Gwen mention the call to Stone? I thought it over and decided that she probably would not. I couldn’t believe she had any knowledge of the frame, and thus would not know that he had to be protected-assuming, that is, that he was guilty. Thus what she would have to say, in effect, was something like this: I had a long distance call today, I think it was from Alex, but he pretended to be a market research surveyor and I told him any number of things about us before I guessed that it was him.

Gwen has never enjoyed looking like a fool. Few people do. She would forget the conversation, or convince herself that it was not me after all, or some such. She would not mention it to Stone, and he would not know that I was measuring him for an electric chair. Good.

The New York Public Library showed me Russell J. Stone’s face. There is a magazine, I discovered, called Purchasing World, a trade journal which is evidently of some interest to purchasing agents. According to my once-wife, Stone had been promoted to his present position a bit over three years ago, so I went through a stack of issues of that vintage looking for the story that would inevitably accompany such a promotion.

Patient plodding is the cornerstone of historical research. I made my boring way through the stack of issues until I finally found the article. They had given him most of a column, and there was a good head-and-shoulders shot of him, lips smiling bravely, eyes frank and open, hair neatly combed and parted. He looked like a large man, a beef and bourbon type, a little older than me, a good bit wealthier than me, a far sight more successful than me in almost every respect. Gwen, I thought, had stepped up nicely, had made a good exchange.

I read the article. There was a boring lot on what his new duties would include, and what his old duties had included, and then there was the biography of our hero, the college he went to, the fraternity, the honors, the first jobs, all the grand and glorious steps he had climbed en route to the pinnacle of success he presently occupied, purchasing director for Interpublic Chemical.

He was an Indianan, a Purdue graduate. He worked first in Pittsburgh, then for a long stretch in Chicago, and finally in California. And, almost completely hidden in the list of jobs, there was the information that he had been on special assignment for his Chicago employers for the better part of a year, the very year Evangeline Grant was murdered and Alexander Penn saddled with her murder.

Special assignment in their New York office.

I ripped that page out of Purchasing World, feeling as I did so that few persons beside myself were likely to have any great interest in that particular story. I, on the other hand, would want to refer to it from time to time. I had found my man. Now I would have to hang it on him. I wanted to know everything that page could teach me about him. I wanted to stare long and hard at that sleek successful face, and I wanted to coax and prod my memory until I could know where I might have seen that face before.

In my room I drew the blinds and lay on my bed in the darkness. I concentrated on that face, and then I went back to the night when it happened. The arm, the hand, the knife, all of it going for Robin while I lay there, doing nothing. I tried to match a body to that arm and put a face on that body. It seemed as though there was something about that arm that was memorable but I couldn’t focus it in my mind. I invented the right sort of body for an old Purdue football player gone a little bit to fat, and I put that sleek head on top of it, and I fought fiercely to make myself remember having seen it all just that way.

But it wouldn’t work. I could just about convince myself that it had happened that way, but I couldn’t make it interlock with anything that remained in my memory. It was possible, I thought, that with the selective vision of the drunk, I had seen only the arm and the hand and had never seen the killer’s face at all.

If that were the case, teasing my memory would do no good. I could not force myself to recall what I had never seen.

In the darkness, in the quiet, I found myself remembering Sunday morning in the Maxfield Hotel It was now-what? Tuesday, incredibly enough. Tuesday afternoon, late afternoon.

It seemed ages ago.

I let myself remember it, the moment of discovery, all of it. And then there was something that had not bothered me before, but that seemed inconsistent now. When I wrapped myself up in the bedsheet and went down the hall to the bathroom, the door to my room had been locked. Not from the outside-you needed the key to lock that door, and the key had been in the room with me. But the door had been bolted from within, and I had unbolted it before I could leave.

Who could have locked it? Robin? It seemed logical that she would, but I couldn’t remember her doing so. And if she had, how had the killer entered the room?

All right. Suppose, then, that she had not bolted the door. Then whoever killed her had somehow contrived to bolt the door after killing her, and leave without disturbing the lock. It was possible, if there was a fire escape at the window, or a door leading to an adjoining room. But why do it that way? Why not just leave by the regular door?

Of course it made a better frame this way. Finding myself locked in with her, I had to believe that I had killed her myself. But-

There was a sudden flash of horrible doubt, and I threw myself up from the bed and turned on the overhead light, unwilling to be alone in the darkness with the horrible feeling of dread.

Because-

Because suppose the memory of that arm and hand were a false memory, a schizoid separation of self from self. Suppose, then, that a part of my mind had chosen to see myself kill Robin and view it as the act of another man. Suppose-

No.

I was not going to let it be that way. No.