The Seducer

16

Trajan was the name of a Roman Emperor. It was also the name of the detective-lieutenant who was assigned to investigate the murder of Madelaine Cannon.

Trajan, the detective, was an obese man who suffered from a chronic condition that he referred to as acid indigestion. He really knew very well that acid indigestion is not a condition which is at all likely to be chronic, for he was not stupid. But a deep and tortuous fear of the truth, or of what might turn out to be the truth, kept him from getting a more accurate diagnosis. He was given, naturally, to much belching, and he always carried in his pocket a tin snuff box filled with milk of magnesia tablets which he bought for economy’s sake in large bottles.

The tablets were ineffective, except for the slight psychological effect of a placebo, but chewing them gave him a feeling of doing something constructive and sensible, and he was prevented by their laxative power from consuming them in sufficient quantity to do him any particular harm. His breath was sour, and his disposition was as sour as his breath. His attitudes were controlled by a kind of graduated scale of hatreds. The degree of his hatred for any particular person, place or thing could be measured by the expression of a pair of sick little eyes buried deep in folds of pasty flesh.

His hatred of Bradley Cannon was intense. It was not merely a sudden development, an instant reaction, but a virulence that had lain dormant within him, fully grown and festering, for the time when Brad would come along to claim it.

The presence of this sick hatred in the room was as real and ugly in its implications as the body on the bed. From the moment of their meeting more than an hour ago, Brad had been convicted in the mind of Trajan of the murder of his wife. Neither the conviction nor the hatred was diminished in the least by evidence that Brad had been elsewhere when the murder occurred.

Now, standing by the bed and looking down at the body for at least the tenth time, he belched and rubbed the big belly hanging over his belt. Feeling no particular pity for the dead woman, he derived a deep and dark satisfaction from damning her killer.The son of a bitch, he thought.The arrogant, slick son of a bitch.

Turning away from the bed and the body, he began again to prowl the room, opening drawers and looking into the closet, all of which he had opened and looked into before, and finding nothing conspicuous either by its absence or its presence. No sign of burglary. No sign of searching. No sign of anything at all but murder. The body of a woman in an undisturbed room. Not even the weapon. Not even the single, lousy, lucky break of a weapon dropped and left behind. His thick lips slack, his hips and huge bottom quaking like an enormous woman’s, he rounded the room and came back to the bed.

“Where in hell is that God-damn coroner?” he said.

In his place near the bathroom door, where he had been standing almost motionless for the past twenty minutes, Detective Latreel Freeman shrugged and looked away from Trajan. Freeman was a thin, fastidious man, gray and dry and aseptically clean, and he found his superior revolting. The sight and smell of Trajan made him uneasy in his stomach.

“I told you,” he said. “He’s on a hospital call. He’ll be here as soon as he can.”

“That’s the trouble with having a lousy practicioner as coroner. Every time you need him, he’s out running down a God-damn case of measles or something.”

“Pregnancy.”

“What?”

“I said pregnancy. He’s delivering a baby.”

“Jesus Christ. He may be at it half the night.”

“Maybe. It won’t make a lot of difference.” Freeman executed an abbreviated gesture in the direction of the bed. “This one’s in no hurry.”

“That’s right. She don’t mind waiting at all. But I do. You think I got nothing better to do than hang around all hours waiting for a dead woman to be pronounced dead?”

“I wouldn’t know. Have you?”

Trajan turned his sick little eyes on Freeman, but the latter was staring at nothing special in a far corner of the room, his dry, gray face cleaned carefully of all expression. Trajan knew very well that he was offensive to Freeman, and the knowledge gave him a bitter pleasure. Contempt prevented him from exaggerating his inferior’s significance, but he did accord the frail detective the distinction of a minor hate. He belched and rubbed his belly, then fished in a pocket for the can of magnesia tablets.

“Where’s Cannon?” he said.

“Where you said to put him. Downstairs in the living room.”

“I’ll go down and see him. You stick here.”

“The guy’s tired and shook up. You’d have better luck if you sent him to bed and talked with him in the morning.”

“Bed? You think a guy whose wife has just been murdered could just go off to bed and go to sleep like nothing had happened?”

“He could take something. There are such things as sedatives, you know. Or hadn’t you heard?”

“I heard, Freeman. I know. I also know you’re a God-damn smart-aleck.”

“Am I? Sorry.”

“You’re right about this guy’s sleeping, though. He wouldn’t have any trouble at all, and he wouldn’t need the help of any sedative. He’s the kind of son of a bitch who could crawl right into the same bed with the body and go to sleep.”

“You think so? I hadn’t formed that opinion yet. It seems to me he’s pretty upset, but I haven’t got your insight into character, of course.”

“See what I mean, Freeman? A God-damn smart-aleck. That’s what you are.”

“I heard you before, Lieutenant. A God-damn smart-aleck.”

Trajan wheezed, his big belly quivering. His tongue slipped out to wet down his thick lips, leaving visible traces of the white magnesia. His flesh-enfolded eyes looked yellow in the light, as if he had been for a long time on atabrine.

“You’re sharp, Freeman. Real sharp. Big brain. Big heart.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“It’s a wonder to me how a guy so smart got left behind. I wonder why you’re not the lieutenant and I’m not just a plain detective. It don’t seem fair, does it, Freeman?”

“Things happen, Lieutenant. Who knows why? Maybe you got some ideas about it.”

“A few, Freeman. I got a few. One of them is that you got no guts. You got no guts for your job. You bleed too much and too easy, Freeman. You even bleed for a lousy murderer. A wife-killer.”

“I don’t bleed. I don’t start off hating and accusing, either. I wait for some evidence.”

“He stinks, Freeman. He stinks of murder, and he’s guilty as hell.”

“He must be a magician, then, as well as a murderer. He wasn’t even here. He was at a meeting. There are at least six unimpeachable witnesses to it.”

“I know. Half a dozen crack-pot professors. I’ll talk to them myself later, Freeman, and not over the telephone. Next time I won’t leave it to you. There’s something wrong, and I’ll find it. You’ll see. It’ll turn out he was away for a while, long enough to commit murder, and they just forgot to remember it. Something like that.”

“I doubt it. College professors aren’t the absent-minded idiots that illiterates like to make them out.”

“Meaning me for one, Freeman?”

“Are you illiterate, Lieutenant? I thought I saw you reading a newspaper once. Maybe you were only looking at the comics.”

“Maybe.” Trajan’s pasty face flushed a little and quickly drained again, having more than ever the color and texture of old and yeastless dough. “You despise my guts, don’t you, Freeman? You think I’m a sick, sadistic son of a bitch, don’t you, Freeman?”

“I’d rather not answer those questions, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, Freeman. I don’t mind a damn. I know God-damn well what you think without any answers, and I couldn’t care less. Why the hell should I care about the opinion of a miserable little puke like you?”

Trajan belched again and rammed his fat fingers under his belt, pressing inward against his belly. His lips twisted in disgust at the taste in his mouth.

“You better go to a doctor about that, Lieutenant,” Freeman said. “It might be cancer.”

Trajan left the room without another word, walking across to the door from the bed with short, quick steps, almost mincing, that seemed somehow obscene in relation to his gross body. He gave no overt sign of the obsessive fear, aroused by Freeman’s words, that kept company inside him with his possible malignancy.

Descending the stairs into the lower hall, he passed a policeman in uniform and went into the living room where Brad sat slumped in a chair in front of the cold fireplace. Dragging a straight chair into position alongside, Trajan sat down and leaned forward. Laughter, secret and sour, stirred within him when Brad’s head turned away from a current of polluted breath.

“How are you feeling?” Trajan said.

“Very tired and confused.” Brad looked at Trajan and away. His voice was apathetic, his eyes lusterless.

He appeared to be in a state of shock. “I simply can’t believe it. It can’t be true.”

“It’s true, all right. Your wife’s dead. Murdered. What time was it when you found her body?”

“I told you that before. A little after eleven. When I came home from a faculty meeting.”

“Who else was at the meeting?”

“Members of the department. The Mathematics Department. I gave the names to the other policeman. Freeman. He wrote them down.”

“Yes. So you did. He’s already checked with some of them, but I’ll check again. I’ll check and check and check, and maybe sooner or later someone will remember something significant he had been forgetting before.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. It’s just the way I work. Are you sure you can’t think of anyone who would be glad to have your wife dead?”

“God, no! Such an idea is fantastic. It must have been a burglar. Someone who killed her when she woke up and surprised him in the room.”

“Nothing was taken. You said so yourself. What kind of burglar takes nothing away with him?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t have time. Perhaps he became frightened and fled after killing Madelaine. It’s reasonable to assume that he did.”

“Now that’s a nice thing about being on a case where a bright guy like you is concerned. He’s always available to tell me what’s reasonable and what’s not reasonable. Being reasonable, Dr. Cannon, you might care to comment on the fact that there was no sign of breaking and entering. No window jimmied open. No door forced. No sign at all of B & E. Does that seem reasonable? Does that seem like burglary?”

“The back door must have been left unlocked. He must have tried the door and simply walked in.”

“The back door? Why? Why not the front door?”

“Because I left by the front door, and I remember locking it. It was still locked when I returned home.”

“You don’t remember locking the back door?”

“No. As I recall, I neglected to check it.”

“Were you usually so careless?”

“Usually, when I went out alone at night, my wife was up and presumably locked it herself.”

“But tonight she had gone to bed early. Isn’t that what you said? With a sick headache.”

“That’s right. She took a sedative and went to bed.”

“Did she frequently have these headaches?”

“Quite often. I suppose you could say frequently.”

“It all worked out pretty conveniently, didn’t it?”

“Conveniently? I don’t understand.”

“Well, for this hypothetical burglar who didn’t steal anything. You gone, your wife in bed under sedation, the back door unlocked. Wouldn’t you say that was all pretty convenient?”

“What in the name of God are you implying?” Brad demanded.

“Am I implying something?”

“It seems to me that you are, and it may be that you’ll regret it. Frankly, Lieutenant, you’ve been as offensive and brutal under the circumstances as you could possibly be. You may be sure that I’ll say so to the county attorney, who is a friend of mine, at the first opportunity.”

Trajan stood up. He looked down at Brad with dull and venomous eyes, his hatred alive and virulent and wholly irrational. It occurred to him that it might be smart to start looking for another woman. A great, griping pain was in his belly, and his belch, which he could not restrain, had the effect of a deliberate and vulgar insult.

“You do that, Dr. Cannon,” he said. “You talk to the county attorney.”

He heard an ambulance pull up in the street at last, and he turned and walked out into the hall.