Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1. Whole No. 284, July 1967

Divorce — New York Style by Cornell Woolrich [Part 2 of 2]

In last month’s installment Stephen Duane registered in a hotel under his true name and waited in his room for a girl to join him in the pretense of being caught in flagrante delicto — caught “in the act” by his wife, her lawyer, the hotel detective, and a photographer. Stephen Duane didn’t like it, but he had no choice.

The first part of the story ended with the discovery that the girl had died in the bed during the break-in and photographing. “And the next thing Steve knew, the door slammed shut and he was alone and half dressed in a hotel room, with a dead stranger on the bed to explain away.”

The unknown girl had been murdered, and Steve Duane was in the greatest peril of his life... Now finish this fascinating story by the one and only Cornell Woolrich...

The room they had put Duane in looked like an office. It was that in every sense of the word, because any room used to transact business is an office. And investigating a sudden death is a business. Even though it’s non-commercial, non-profit-making, it’s still a business. The business of the police.

This business office was in the precinct house that had jurisdiction over the area in which the death had occurred; the office was not chic — it was shabby, smudgy, and shopworn. But then neither is death chic; it too is shabby, smudgy, and shopworn. So the market place matched the commodity.

There were filing cabinets around three walls — sheet-iron baked an ugly olive-green, which even when it was new must have been bilious-conjuring, and now it wasn’t new any more. Each cabinet had a red-edged label slotted into the front, but all these had on them were capital index-letters, two or three to a bracket, in the usual alphabetical order. A couple of letters, X and Z, had been left out, probably because they were too seldom used.

What lay in back of the index-letters was inscrutable — a secret of police bookkeeping. The only sign that the letters were ever used at all — and that sign was not conclusive — was that someone in a hurry had once forgotten to pat down one of the inside cards even with the rest, and the closing of the cabinet drawer had caught a corner of it, bent it over, and held it sticking out in a little white triangle. It might have happened yesterday or it might have happened a year before, but no one had ever bothered to straighten it out. They all seemed to go to that particular cabinet for some other card, and they didn’t have time for that one.

A dog-eared file card, carelessly left that way, even though somebody’s life blood may have once been inscribed on it. What is life but a dog-eared file card anyway, pulled out, pushed back again, by some big anonymous thumb.

Duane was sitting at a battered table. He was in that nebulous classification known to the police as “Mind if we ask you a few questions?” This was far short of any state of actual detention. And yet at the same time it was definitely not the status designated as “Well, that’ll be all; you can go now.” He hadn’t tried getting up and leaving, but he had a pretty good idea that if he had, it would have been brought home to him, tactfully but firmly, that that was not the status he was in. The bottommost, of course, of all these echelons was the unwelcome and least sought-after (by the police themselves) beginning: “Lady, we’re pretty busy down here; maybe if you ask them yourself, in a nice way, they’ll tone down the volume of their TV set.”

But the top one of all, the peak, the dread climax, the final category beyond which there was no going, seldom used and seldom wasted, was wordless: a rough-armed shove into a chair and an incisive jerk of a thumb to a stenographer to begin shorthanding a confession.

Repeat: the dread climax, the culmination — a wordless shove onto a chair and a thumb-jerked signal to a stenographer to start shorthanding a confession.

There was another man sitting at the table with Duane. He was in unmarked clothing, of course, and what his exact rank was Duane couldn’t tell, never having been an aficionado of these processes until today. (And not today, either.) But since all the verbal messages and asides and all the written reports and memos that were floating around the place seemed to converge and land on this other man, it was a good guess that he was high up in the investigation. He was the crux of the proceedings — even Duane’s uninitiated eye could perceive that.

Both of them had cigarettes smoking, but each in a different way, each indicative of his mood and present situation. Duane’s was held tautly in his hand, rising jaggedly every few moments. The other man was smoking calmly, abstractedly, almost like an absent-minded schoolteacher going over his pupil’s homework, letting it balance across the rim of the table until most of it was wasted.

Duane had a nagging impression that his table-mate had joined him in smoking (in fact, he was the one who had encouraged it) in an artful attempt to make him feel relaxed, to put him at ease (and by the same token, off-guard), in a sort of simulated camaraderie that was not only less than skin-deep but was ready to vanish altogether from one moment to the next at the first wrong word Duane said. In any case, as a sedative, the cigarette wasn’t working at all. He didn’t like where he was, and he didn’t like why he was where he was. And though the sum-total of his physical exertion since he’d been sitting here was simply to uncross and recross his legs, his heartbeat felt like someone knocking on a door.

The homicide man spoke unusually good English. Duane had an idea he’d gone to night school to acquire it. But his face didn’t go with it. They don’t hand those out at night school. His looked like that of a bricklayer whose face had once got caught between two of his own bricks. And left mortared-in overnight. At the same time he spoke like an angel — an angel with a Princeton degree.

“Wasn’t there any other way to do it?” he was asking. “Couldn’t you have avoided such a charade, such a travesty, which in the end fools no one? Everyone’s in on it — you, your wife, both lawyers, and even the court that hears the evidence must smell a rat; what it amounts to is collusion of the worst sort. I realize that under our present New York State law, proven adultery is the only admissible grounds, but then why couldn’t you have gone out of town for it instead? To Reno or Juarez or one of those places? We’re just simple cops down here, and it’s not our detail, but I have no sympathy for anyone who twists around the law that way.”

Duane squirmed guiltily and turned even paler. “She was the one bringing the action,” he explained defensively. “And she didn’t want to leave New York. She had somebody else interested in her, and she was afraid she’d lose him if she went away. There’s an old saying: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder — for somebody else.’”

“Fine bunch of cynics,” growled the police officer, shaking his head disgustedly. “I believe we should keep our bargains, good or bad, when it comes to marriage. And it’s for people like you we’re supposed to risk our necks and—”

He didn’t finish, but went back to his own stamping grounds, while Duane looked down boyishly.

“And you say you never saw this girl before?”

“I never set eyes on her before in my life until she knocked at the hotel-room door.”

“And you didn’t know her name either?”

“We didn’t exchange names.”

“You got into a bed together, but you didn’t exchange names,” the policeman commented drily.

Duane looked down again. I didn’t know she was going to die, he felt like saying, but he thought he’d better not; it sounded too flippant, and he didn’t feel that way about it. Then he thought he should have said it after all — at least, it would have shown he hadn’t expected her to die, and therefore wasn’t responsible for it. But by that time it was too late to say it.

“Would you care to know her name now?”

Duane gave a fatalistic shrug.

“Her name was Rose Metz, but she co-responded under the name of Rose Metcalf.” He shook his head dolefully. “Apparently even in her line of work a fancier name is considered an advantage.”

“Don’t you think it’s more likely that she had too much respect for her family and her people to want to drag down their good name?”

There had been a verbal trap there, he supposed. Not a very deep or devious one, just a surface attempt to elicit recognition or surprise on his face. Which of course wasn’t forthcoming, because Duane had genuinely never heard the girl’s name before.

The homicide man leafed through a report which had already been there on the desk before him when Duane first came in. Apparently this was not a first reading, but a refresher to confirm what he had read the first time. Apparently also, it was a medical report.

“There’s no question of a coronary or any other natural cause. She died of a specific. Its name is nitrobenzene, and it was ingested through the skin, according to the Medical Examiner. Even a few drops on the skin are enough to bring on sudden prostration and sometimes death. Which in this case was not observable because she was already lying quiet in the bed beside you.

“One of the nervous starts following the flash lights might, in her case, have been the act of death occurring, and therefore passed without notice. The M.E. says all the classic symptoms were found to be present: the blood had turned chocolate color, the face gray, the fingernails dark purple, the organs had an odor of bitter almonds, and a few other things that require a pretty strong stomach to listen to, so we don’t need to go into them here. The chemical formula for this beauty is C₆H₅NO₂, and it destroys the oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The technical form of death is therefore respiratory paralysis, or in everyday talk, asphyxiation.” And in an admiring aside to himself he said, “He’s got everything down, this guy.”

Sounds almost too dramatic to be true, Duane thought, but he didn’t say so aloud.

The homicide man seemed to read his mind. Or maybe his own progression of thoughts had followed the same course, so they had come out at the same place. “Death can be very dramatic,” he said, “Especially quick death like this in a young body.”

He slid the report aside. “All right, we know the medical cause. Let’s go on from there. Now, there are two possibilities: either it was self-administered, or it was administered by someone else. We call the first suicide. We call the second murder.”

What is this, Duane wondered, again to himself. A class in police semantics?

“In the first, the act destroys the person who commits the act, so there is nothing left. In the second, the act destroys someone who is not the person who commits the act. That’s where we come in — to find the administerer and pass him or her on for punishment.”

Duane noticed the inclusion of the feminine pronoun. But the only other woman participating in the scene or present at it had been his wife Dolly. A blurred question mark formed in his mind, then faded away again. Still, it might have been just a form of speech. Dolly had remained standing near the door the whole time — he remembered that much; she hadn’t come any farther into the room from first to last.

“There were seven of you in the room all told at one time or another, from time of your check-in to time of police arrival. But not concurrently, not all at the same time.”

He told them off with the end of a pencil against the tips of his fingers, one by one.

“There were: Arnold Kellgard, your attorney. Joey Guzman, the room-service waiter who brought the drinks. Your wife, Dolly Duane. Kevin Cronin, her attorney. Bill Moyer, the hotel security-officer. And Stan Roark, the photographer — the kind of a guy who photographs girls on the half shell for calendars and post cards not meant to be sent through the mail.

“And you,” he concluded neatly.

“You are the only one,” he went on to point out, “who was in the room from start to finish. You run through the thing from beginning to end. From your taking the room until your call to the police.”

“You make me feel good,” Duane couldn’t help mumbling morosely.

“And another thing. You are the only one of the seven who was alone with the girl at any time, without anyone else being present. This happened twice, according to our reconstruction. For a very considerable stretch of say, fifteen minutes between the time you admitted her to the room and the time the fake raiders ‘broke in.’ And again between the time you called us and the time we got there. But by that time she was dead, so we won’t count that one. Although you might have had a chance to dispose of things, such as whatever was left of the nitrobenzene and whatever had been used to carry it in — whatever traces there were around.”

“I didn’t even know what had been used, at that time,” Duane protested with unconvincing logic, “so how could I have disposed of whatever it had been carried in? I wouldn’t have known it even if I saw it.”

“What went on during those fifteen minutes you were alone with her the first time?”

“I told you.”

“Tell it again then.” It was said without any hostility. But he was looking for variations to creep in, Duane knew.

“She said, ‘Are you the gentleman?’ I offered to wait in the hall for her to get ready. Instead she went into the bathroom, locked the door on the inside, got ready, and came out. I offered her a drink. She didn’t take one.”

“She didn’t; right,” the homicide man confirmed. “We checked the used glasses on that.”

“She sat down on the other side of the bed from me and started looking through a movie magazine.”

“You say a movie magazine. How do you know it was a movie magazine?”

“I spotted a picture of Sophia Loren from where I was sitting.”

The police officer opened a drawer, took out a large manila folder, took a movie magazine out of that, and started leafing through it. He stopped when he came to a full-page picture of Sophia Loren. He looked at Duane. “She was reading a movie magazine,” was all he said on that. “Go on.”

“We talked a little, and she told me how she had come to take such jobs, in the beginning. The thought of what she was doing seemed to depress her. Then they knocked on the door and she hurried into bed.” And without quite knowing how it had got in there, he heard himself blurt out, “I liked her.”

This was a variation all right, but a benign one. He could tell by the expression on the other’s face that its ingenuousness had struck him favorably.

“And you didn’t come close to her, didn’t touch her in any way, at any time?”

“Not even from the opposite ends of a cigarette I held out to her which she didn’t take; she didn’t smoke.” His pace of speech quickened a little. “Oh, I nearly forgot. That reminds me. I did leave out something both times, I don’t know if it’s important or not. She asked if she could use the phone, and she called up a Mrs. D, a neighbor of hers, to ask how her little boy was. This Mrs. D was looking after him for her.”

The homicide man got up immediately, went over to the door opening onto the corridor, and called out to someone. “Check out a Mrs. D, same house and same floor as the Metz girl. Go up and have a talk with her. Maybe she can fill us in on some background data.”

Someone said, “Right.”

When he’d come back to the table, he gave Duane the ultimate in compliments, from a police officer to a questionee. “You’ve come up with a pretty good batting average.” Then he took a little of the shine out of it by adding, “So far.”

“We give each and every one a dry run first,” he said as he sat down again. “Then some we may call in a second time, and some even a third time. And out of all of them, sooner or later somebody stays in for keeps.

“But my own feeling, and that’s why I’m being so open about this and letting you sit in on it the way I am, is that the final break, when it comes, won’t be at this end at all. Won’t be at the hotel room either. It’ll be at the other end, at the point of origin. At the place where the stuff was purchased, stolen, or otherwise obtained. Access to and possession of. That’s where the breakthrough will come. Because otherwise nobody has a motive worth a nickel.

“Since this wasn’t a genuine wife-cheating, only a set-up, your wife Dolly certainly doesn’t have any motive; the girl was helping her get the very thing she wanted — divorce evidence. Why should she demolish the evidence by doing away with its donor? No motive.

“The same goes for both lawyers. Their fees in this case depended on the girl’s services. No motive, no motive.

“The hotel security-man — this may not be for the squeamish — gets a cut or a kickback out of the proceedings, just as he does out of other kinds of night calls in that type of hotel, which we don’t have to go into here.”

Duane noticed he had omitted to mention three of the seven: the photographer, the room-service waiter, and himself. He hitched around on his chair, as though it were becoming overheated.

“Let’s have them all in for a second processing,” the homicide man said. He picked up his phone. “Send Moyer the hotel dick in.”

“Sit down, Bill.” The investigator used the man-to-man technique on him, Duane noticed.

Moyer made an informal hydraulic-crane shape out of one leg across the top of the other, then hung onto the ankle of it with both hands as though to make sure the ankle didn’t detach itself from the rest of the leg.

“You’d already seen the girl before you flagged down the room. That what you told us before?”

“I seen her going up. I knew what she was there for,”

“How’d you know?”

“I’d seen her do the same trick before, that’s how I knew.”

“You didn’t object?”

“Look, if the hotel don’t care, why should I? I work for the hotel. It’s gotta be done somewhere.”

“You a married man, Bill?”

“That’s a handout from the birds,” said Bill poetically.

“Got a girl, Bill?”

“Three or four,” said Bill.

“She one of them?”

“Narrh,” said Bill, as if his good taste was being questioned. “She din’ get to me,” he explained succinctly.

“In other words, you didn’t like her but you didn’t dislike her either.”

“I was completely newtrull,” Bill said.

Exit Moyer the hotel detective.

“Not the type,” was the interrogator’s exonerating remark. “A chemical agent would be too subtle for him. His way would more likely be to break a girl’s neck between his bare hands and bring down the walls and half the ceiling while he was about it, with enough noise for the riot squad to be called.”

Next came Stan Roark the photographer.

The homicide man’s approach this time was unfriendly and unbending, Duane soon caught on — the normal reaction of the detective to anything veering toward the shady side.

“Do much of this stuff?” was his opener.

“What stuff?” was the to-be-expected answer to the gambit.

“Taking phony pictures for spiked divorce cases.”

“Cronin called me and told me he wanted me to take pictures of a couple in a hotel room. He told me what hotel, which room, and what time to be there. That’s all I know.”

The homicide man raised his voice to an ugly yell. “Well, that isn’t all we know! He’s a mind reader, ha? That’s how he knew ahead of time which room in which hotel they were going to be in, and what time they were going to be in there! If that isn’t a souped-up—”

“Taking pictures isn’t illegal. I don’t plead the case, he pleads it. He’s the one you want to talk to, not me.”

This didn’t do the questioning-officer’s mood any good. “One of these I-know-my-legal-rights creeps, eh? Try to give me that, and I’ll rub your dirty nose in this mess, I promise you!”

And he proceeded to do the talking the other had tried to sidestep. “How long have you known this girl?” he asked ominously.

“Never saw her before,” came the clipped answer.

“Let’s see if he’s got her listed.” Again the man in charge of the investigation took out one of those manila envelope-folders, all ticketed and indexed for ready reference. From this one he took out a black pocket-size address-and-telephone notebook, its pages warped and swollen by numerous postscript-entries, thumbings-through, and holdings at an open split while in use, so that the pages no longer fell together flat the way they should have.

He handed it to someone else at the table, though. This was so there could be audible playback between them, for Roark to hear. A man thumbing a book can’t talk to himself out loud; he can, but it’s not very convincing.

“Wherdge get that?” Roark alerted with instant ownership-jealousy.

“At that cockroachy loft you call a studio,” was the noncourteous answer. “Look under N first,” he instructed the man with the book. This was a deliberate false lead, Duane guessed, so that relief would show on Roark’s face at their obvious lack of accurate information, and later give him away if he really did know her name. There was no other way to explain it. Duane could see the homicide man watching Roark’s face with target-practice intentness.

Nothing showed on it. Not even the effort to make sure that nothing did show.

“Try M, then.”

Still nothing showed. He really doesn’t know her name, Duane became convinced.

“Try R for Rose, without any second name.”

Nothing showed — not in the book, not on the face.

“Go on, get out of here!” roared the examiner in dismissal, with all the irritability of any person, policeman or layman, who comes out second-best. “But don’t think we’re not going to keep an eye on you!”

“Can I have my book back?” was the last thing Roark said.

“In the rear of a pig you can!” the detective thundered at him. And in this one instance, at least, he was neither angelic nor Princetonian in diction. “We’re turning it over to the Vice Squad for further study. See them about it.”

“Bluff,” he admitted when the door had closed. “But I like to see that kind of guy squirm a little.”

The two lawyers were what is known colloquially as a breeze. They just walked through, as stage people say. The detective’s attitude, from what Duane could judge, seemed to be that they both knew the law too well to try to monkey around with anything like murder. Their own professional experience had taught them that you can’t win. They weren’t fools enough to cut their own throats that way. He treated both with lip-respect but with very obvious personal disapproval, because of the short cut by which they had sought to get around the divorce law. He had Arnold in first, then Mrs. Duane’s lawyer.

Nothing of any importance was said.

Arnold had never seen the girl from first to last, not in life, not in death. He had already left the room and gone back to his office, Duane now recalled, before she arrived. Then when he caught up with Duane at the station house for a first consultation, she was already at the city morgue.

Kevin Cronin’s story was substantially that which the girl had told Duane herself. Her dead husband had been his client; after his death Cronin had felt sorry for her, given her part-time typing jobs. Then he’d made her this offer to play a divorce dummy from time to time. No pressure had been involved — she had accepted voluntarily.

To this all the homicide man had to say, brittlely, was: “Your motives seem pretty good, counselor. But your methods were a little bit seamy, weren’t they? Wasn’t there a more honorable way you could have helped her?”

“It’s all relative,” was the enigmatic reply. “What’s honorable, what’s dishonorable? I don’t know these things; do you? I think it’s honorable for a young woman to support her baby boy by taking on a job she finds obnoxious, distasteful. More honorable by far than if she did something like this without the pressing need to do it.”

“You can tell he’s a lawyer,” was the homicide man’s summary, glancing over his shoulder as the door closed. “He leaves you all tangled up.” He shook his head, as if to clear it.

“Send the lady in,” was his next directive.

There was only one lady in it, and Duane knew who she must be.

“I’m going to ask you to step inside to the next room,” the detective in charge said to Duane. “She’ll be able to answer my questions more naturally; you’d only make each other self-conscious if you were both in the room at the same time.”

This was the first time he’d asked him to do this, and that spectral question mark in his mind, as before, glowed briefly, then dimmed again.

He went into an adjoining room and they closed the door on him. They did the closing themselves to make sure it was closed. That small detail made him vaguely uneasy; it was too much like being in custody. Well, he was actually, he reminded himself; a thing doesn’t have to have a label to be a fact.

He pulled a straightback wooden chair over by the window and sat down to stare, looking inward more than outward. The window had bars, and it hadn’t been washed in so long that trying to see through it was like looking through a glass of watery milk held up to a dim light. But on the other side he could make out a cross-section of bricks. Once rosy, they were now gray; maybe put there in the Sixties — the last century’s Sixties, not this. He counted them to give himself something to do. Eight rows up and down, and five bricks across in each row.

What could she tell them, anyway? Only that from where she stood he’d been a lousy husband, and that wasn’t what was being investigated. Funny, he thought; if I’d been a better husband and she’d been a better wife, that girl might be alive right now.

“All right, Duane, you can come back,” somebody called through, closed door and all, and he got up, opened the door, and went back in.

The homicide man was just coming back from showing someone to the door. A quite unusual courtesy, around there.

Fancy Dan, the ladies’ man, Duane commented to himself, quite unjustly. But the thought of his wife always put a mental chip on his shoulder. That perfume she always used, Dangeureuse, was all over everything.

The homicide man was shading his mouth with the curved edge of his hand, to close off a slow-dying grin.

“What was it, some crack about me?” Duane accused hotly.

“About the girl,” he said deprecatingly. “I have no right to laugh, either. She’s got a sense of humor, though. ‘She was a good girl, you can count on that. I bet she read her Bible every night. Sure, every night in a different hotel room.’”

He sat down and riffled some papers he had been referring to during the last questioning. And when he nudged a paper clip onto the edge of them and gave them a little half fling away from him, Duane somehow knew it meant that person was in the clear.

“Now we have two left. The waiter — and you.”

Duane’s shoulders bunched a little, defensively.

Next he’s going to say, he told himself miserably, Now we have one left — you.

“Bring in Josélito Guzman, better known in English as Joey among the hotel bell crew. And bring in the tape you got on that interview. You know the one.”

Something was brought in and parked over in the corner, with a crepe-like black hood draped over it like the ones they sometimes use to cover typewriters.

Duane remembered the face from the brief interlude with the tray that had been swung around in putting it down, and that he had swerved away from to avoid colliding with it. Good-looking face, choir-boy face, badly frightened face.

“My shift start at four. If I do not clock in, I lose my job.”

“You won’t,” was the calm reassurance.

“Or else I lose my whole-day pay, which for me just as bad.”

On this he received no reassurance.

“Now repeat what you’ve already told us once before. We want to check for some little detail that you might have forgotten. Go over it carefully.”

His confidence came back. He became more voluble. Some of the quick Spanish speech-beat slipped over into his English. “Orrai. The bellboy ring down about five fifteen, maybe a little after. The room-service steward set up the tray — rye, White Rock, bucket of ice, two empty glasses. He hand it to me, I take it up there.”

“Who was in the room?”

“Two men.” He turned to look Duane in the face, straight forwardly enough. “This man. And one other man, wearing glasses.”

“No girl?”

He semaphored an emphatic negative with his hands, crossing them over, then spreading them apart. “No girl. Nobody else.”

“Did you come back a second time?”

“I have to bring back change. He gave me ten-dollar bill, and I do not have my tip yet.”

“Who was in there then?”

“Now one man is gone. Now girl is there. This man, he still there.” He nudged toward Duane with his chin.

“Did you see who the girl was?”

“She put magazine up over her face, to keep me from seeing who she is.”

“But you did see who she was?”

“Same girl I see twice before in room.”

The homicide man, for reasons of his own, wanted this clarified. “You mean in that same room?”

“No, no. Different room, different man, but same girl.” And under his breath in his own language he added a reflection that sounded like: “Desgraciada.” Disgraceful one, or disgraced one. Something like that.

“You don’t approve?”

Sullen shrug. “I am not a priest.”

“Could you love a girl like that?”

Duane wondered where the homicide man was going with this — he was so far off-base.

“I have to be crazy,” was the bitter answer.

“Tell me a little more about yourself. Your family background.”

“I come here from Puerto Rico when I am twelve.”

“Your family come with you, or you come alone?”

“They stay down there, but I have uncle who is already here. He have own business in New Jersey, he make good money. They send me to him, so I learn business. I go to night school, and in daytime I work for him in shop. I am—” He reached for a word, found it. “—apprentice.”

“What line of business is this uncle of yours in?”

“He is in shoe business.”

“You mean he repairs shoes, and like that? How can there be much money in—?”

“No, no. He make them. He has little factory.”

“Oh, he’s a shot-manufacturer. I see.”

“Not like big company, big chain. Just small, one-man business, few machines in loft building, to cut lasts, stitch tops to soles—”

“Dye?” supplied the homicide man almost unnoticeably.

“Dye,” the waiter replied. “Everything from firs’ to las’.”

“Like a small, family-type enterprise?”

“But our people buy from him a lot. He know just what they like, better than some big shoe company.”

“Let’s get back to the girl,” said the homicide man briskly, as though this had all been a side issue, a breathing spell, a chit-chat break. “If you didn’t know her, and she didn’t know you, why did she put a magazine up to screen her face like that, when you stepped in there?”

“Because she have a guilty heart.” He probably means conscience, Duane thought. “She know she should be ashame’ to be there. And because she know that, it make her to be ashame’.”

“That won’t wash,” the homicide man told him flatly. “The street doorman held the door open for her when she came in; she didn’t try to hide her face from him. The starter looked right at her as she stood there by the elevator waiting for the car; she didn’t try to hide her face from him. When she got on and told the operator what floor she wanted, he looked right at her too; and she didn’t try to hide her face from him. We’ve checked with all these people. Why were you the only one she tried to hide her face from? Why just you?”

Silence.

“You don’t answer. Then I’ll answer for you. Because you knew her on the outside, you’ve seen her on the outside, gone out with her on the outside—” he produced one of those pauses that are so dramatic at such times “—been in love with her on the outside. And told her you’d rather see her dead than doing what she was doing — on the outside.”

“I din’ know her from... from!” the young fellow cried out.

“Oh, yes you knew her from — from. Now you’re starting to tell lies.” The homicide man’s patient air of reproach was almost paternal. “And we’re going to have to keep you from doing that.” He turned to somebody else. “Run the tape of the interview with Mrs. D. Never mind the earlier part of it. Cut in — you know where I mean — where she hears the doorbell ringing next door.”

He cut in a little too soon. A single word came out — meaningless standing alone by itself. He rectified his starting place, moved further along, and the next try hit it on the nose. It started to slither with a hiss as soft as a nylon being shuffled up a woman’s leg.

“One night I heard a continuous ringing at her doorbell. You know how these apartment house walls are, like tissue paper. And the bell battery was right up against my own wall. It was like having a bee in the room with you. I knew she was in there with the baby, and I wondered why she didn’t answer it. It kept on, and kept on, and kept on. Finally I opened my own door a couple of inches, with the chain left on, and peeked out. There was a young man standing there in front of her door. He was holding a bunch of flowers in his hand.

“While I was watching, I saw him give one last push at the bell. It still didn’t get an answer from her. Then he threw the flowers down on the floor, kicked them apart with his foot, stomped all over them, and went away steaming mad.”

Man’s voice: “Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“I most certainly would. He was turning his face every which way, so I got a look at it from all sides. When she came over to see me later on, after the coast was clear, she told me she’d had to hold her hand over the baby’s mouth the whole time to keep it from cooing or gurgling, and giving her away.”

Man’s voice: “Did she know who was ringing?”

“Of course. She stole a look from the window and saw him come out down below as he was leaving the house.”

Man’s voice: “Did she tell you who?”

“The first thing she told me. She said, ‘That was Joey again, that room-service waiter down at the hotel.’ Those were her very words. She said, ‘I made the mistake of my life going out with him those couple of times. Now I can’t get rid of him. He not only wants to reform me, he wants to marry me. He thinks I do it for real and not just for legal evidence. I can’t seem to get it through his head’.”

The tape cut off.

“Come inside,” the homicide man said to the waiter. “I want you to stand up for Mrs. Diamond and see if she identifies you.”

There was a taut wait of several minutes, after they’d gone out of the room, that Duane found as nerve-racking and hard to bear as though his own destiny was hanging in the balance, not somebody else’s.

When the homicide man reappeared in the doorway he was alone. Joey the lovelorn had been sidetracked off somewhere.

He made that gesture that has been referred to before, the sign-off, the final one, the climax to it all — the gesture that means it’s all over, like the downturned thumbs of the Romans in the arena — the thumb jerk to the police stenographer. “Inside,” he said, “and bring your pad along. Get ready to take down a confession.”

And in an aside to Duane, as he turned to follow him out, he couldn’t help beaming: “Whoever invented the tape recorder did more for us cops than anyone else since the beginnings of crime, Bertillon included.”

There was another wait, much longer this time, but not as much of a strain.

Duane fiddled with his hands on the table, cracking his finger joints, twirling the ashtray by its edge, first one way then the other. He hadn’t been told he could go, and he was afraid if he got up and tried to, the man who had stayed behind at the table laboriously checking something out, would lift up his head and say, Who told you you could go?

He did lift it finally, as Duane’s restlessness at last penetrated his awareness.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” Duane said lamely.

“I’ll send someone out for you.” He called a uniformed patrolman to the door.

Sheepishly Duane named his brand.

When the man had come back and handed over the pack, Duane asked his table companion behind the back of his hand, “Do you tip a cop when he gets some cigarettes for you?”

“That would be insulting his uniform.” And then the man added with an enigmatic drop of an eyelid, “You’re our guest here.”

To Duane it didn’t sound as convivial as it was meant to.

The homicide man came back in, multiple papers in his hand. “Signed, sealed, and delivered,” he said. “Case closed.”

The humanist in Duane couldn’t help thinking while he watched the homicide man pat his paperwork together: he did his job and did it well. And yet — somebody’s going to have to pay with years of his life for it. Does he have to look so darned serene, even happy, about it?

“I told you the break would come from the outside, at the source,” he said to Duane. “Access and opportunity to possess. I knew it was he the minute he told me his uncle had a shoe-manufacturing plant. This nitrobenzine is used in the dyeing of shoes. He was the only one of the seven could put his fingers on it quickly and without any difficulty. And there’s a switch to it that might interest you a lot.”

“What?”

“He admits he poured the stuff into the bucket of cracked ice, which was pretty soupy by that time anyway. It was you the stuff was intended for, not the girl at all. He’d been out with her two or three times, and he knew she never touched a drop under any circumstances. You were the defiler, so you were supposed to get it. He didn’t count on her dipping the handkerchief in the ice water to make a sort of cold compress of it before pasting it across the upper part of her face.”

“I didn’t notice her do that, myself,” Duane admitted.

“Probably you were too flustered by their knocking on the door right then. She must have done that, because our toxicologist found the handkerchief impregnated with it. How else explain it? Lucky for you that you didn’t take a drink and use that ice, or there would have been a doubleheader in that room.

“The Latins,” he went on, “take their women with an intensity which is almost beyond belief. They’re either all-good or all-bad, all-white or all-black, up on a pedestal or down in the gutter — there’s never any in-between. And you have to compromise, you have to live with the gray, with the in-between, you have to live with life the way it is. He’s not a cold-blooded murderer, he’s a kind of crazy idealist. He’ll probably get an indeterminate sentence.”

Duane was trembling. It could so easily have been himself.

“Have a cup of coffee with us, Mr. Duane, just to show there’s no hard feelings,” the homicide man invited. He was Mr. Duane now that he was in the clear; funny how those things went, he couldn’t help reflecting. If he’d been booked, there’d have been no respectful title.

“I never had coffee in a police station before,” he admitted.

“Well, have some now, then,” he was urged. “It’s on the house.”

When it had been brought in and passed around and siphoned up noisily by lip suction they asked him hospitably, “How is it?”

It was rotten. Rotten was even a compliment to it. It tasted as if somebody’s unwashed socks had been left soaking overnight in the coffee urn. And then a little detergent added to bring out the full bouquet.

Duane didn’t knock it; he was well-mannered that way. He just smiled and swallowed hard to keep it from backing up.

Then he shook hands all around and left.

“Want us to run you home?” the property clerk asked him when he came outside, was given back his belongings, and had signed a receipt.

“I’ll get a taxi,” he said. He’d had enough of the police for one night. Or for one lifetime.

“You may have a hard time getting one around here at this hour,” the deskman called after him as he went out the door. “Most of our traffic is one-way. In. And not by taxi.”

But he didn’t have any trouble. One honked at him impatiently, almost commandingly, just as soon as he had come out on the sidewalk.

“Well, come on, stupid,” a familiar voice called out to him. “Don’t just stand there all night. I want to get home.”

He went up to the door and looked in, and the legal Mrs. Duane was sitting in it, staring at him with what couldn’t exactly be called a melting glance.

“You?” he said bewilderedly. “What do you want now? My right arm? My life’s blood?”

He got in and slammed the door. “Is the divorce off?”

“The S.P.C.A. might object,” she said wearily.

“I thought there was somebody else you were interested in.”

“He’ll keep.”

“He doesn’t come up with fur stoles at the bat of an eyelash. Is that what you mean? There never was a chump like me.”

“Big deal, that mangy thing,” she said scathingly. “It took you so long to clean up the instalments on it that the animal had pups before the pelt was paid for.”

“You must have been pretty sure I’d come out of there, to wait around like this.”

“It figured. You would never be up to killing anybody. It takes a man to do that, not a mush-head like you.”

“Why don’t you turn left there?” he challenged the driver. “Why do you take us all the way over? What are you trying to do, make an extra couple of blocks’ fare on your meter?”

She gave her own knees a brush-off of exasperation, to and fro, as if she was dusting them. “Even in a taxi he’s got to back-seat drive! You wouldn’t be able to find your way to Forty-second Street if you were standing on the south side of Times Square.”

“Why don’t you haul your tongue in to half-mast,” he said chivalrously.

They drove away together side by side, husband and wife. They didn’t love each other. They didn’t hate each other either. Not really. They were used to each other. He was a headache, she was a pain. But somebody new might turn out even worse.

Something the homicide man had said inside there a few minutes ago came back to him. You have to compromise, you have to live with the gray, with the in-between, you have to live with life the way it is.