The Seducer

18

The chief of police was boiling. His expression, directed toward Trajan, was the equivalent of his voice, which was a growl.

“By God, Trajan,” he said, “this is the end! Do you hear me? The end, I’m telling you! I’m willing to go along with my men in any reasonable investigation, but if you think I’m going to support you in what’s assuming the character of persecution, you’re crazy as hell.

“By God, I’ve had the county attorney on my back. I’ve had the mayor on my back. I’ve had protests from men who are just too damn influential to be ignored. They’re all on my back, Trajan, and I’m on yours. The truth is, you’ve been acting like a maniac. You won’t listen to reason from anyone. Have you got an obsession about this Cannon or something? ”

Trajan shifted in his chair, fighting a gaseous eruption, staring behind and above the chief at a juncture of wall and ceiling.

“I got a notion he’s guilty,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Sure.” The chief put his hands flat on his desk, exercising control. “You got a notion, and that’s all you got. You got no proof. You got no evidence. As a matter of fact, all the evidence is to the contrary. God damn it, a half dozen men of the highest repute have testified that he was in their company at the time of the murder. He was there all the time. He didn’t leave for a minute. How the hell do you figure he’s guilty. Black magic or something? Voodoo, maybe?”

“All right. He didn’t actually do it himself. I’m satisfied about that. But he was involved somehow. I’d stake my job on it.”

“That’s exactly what you’re staking, Trajan, if you didn’t know it.”

“Well, you’ll see I’m right. I’ve been working on the angle of a collaborator. Someone in it with him, or maybe someone he just hired.”

“You got any evidence to support collaboration?”

“No. Not yet.”

“All right, then. I’ll tell you something, and you listen. You let Cannon alone until you’ve got evidence you could go to court with. You’ve hounded this man until you’ve got him on the verge of collapse. More important than that, you’ve got my guts in the sauce pan, and I don’t like it.

“This is the last word, Trajan. The last damn word. You go back in there where you’ve been grilling him for the past hour and let him go. Don’t you bring him back, or even go near him, until you’ve got something solid that will stick. What’s more, if you don’t have anything soon, you’re dropping the whole business for good and all. You hear me?”

Trajan stood up. He closed, his mouth tight against a belch, and his gross body shook from the confined eruption.

“I hear you,” he said.

He left the chief’s office and went down a short hall to another room which was his own, and went inside. Brad was sitting alone in a straight chair, his face livid and drawn, his eyes drained of light. He did not look around when Trajan entered.

“The chief says I’ve got to let you go,” Trajan said. “He thinks I’m persecuting you.”

Brad stood up, holding himself carefully erect. By extending himself, he managed to sustain an attitude of cold disdain that he was far from feeling. He was afraid of Trajan. The gross man was as terrifying to him as a nightmare.

“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’m relieved to learn that there is at least one rational man on this police force. Does this mean that I’m now to be free of your persecution?”

“It means I won’t bring you back here, and I won’t bother you anywhere else. Not until I’ve got the one who killed your wife for you. Don’t sleep too well, though. Don’t ever relax. I’ll keep working at it officially as long as they’ll let me, and then I’ll work on it unofficially on my own time. We’ll be seeing each other again, Dr. Cannon.”

Turning, Brad walked out of the room. He felt unreal, a monstrous distortion of himself. Nowadays, with more and more difficulty, he could barely sustain an identity with the man he had been, or a genuine conviction that there was any continuity of experience between then and now. He walked firmly and erect, moving and placing each foot in turn with an effect of excessive care.

It was dark outside. The lights were on. He didn’t know how long he had been in police headquarters, but it had been light when he arrived in response to Trajan’s peremptory summons, and it seemed like a long, long time ago.

He shuddered with a dreadful sense of near disaster when he thought how close he had come, in exhaustion and desperation, to ending his torment by shouting out the truth into Trajan’s ugly face. The fat detective was a madman. There was no question about that. He was a man obsessed and driven by virulent hatred that seeped from his rancid interior without any true relationship to whatever or whoever drew it forth. His final threat, just now delivered, had the quality of a profane vow.

There was to Brad, however, a nearer and more pressing menace than eventual exposure, and this was the menace of disintegration, the frightful dissolution of courage and confidence and control. It was evident in a growing inability to conduct his classes properly or to deal effectively with the slightest problem. The danger in this was that it would surely be open, after passing for a while as a natural reaction to shock and grief, to an interpretation of guilt and fear. In fact, he felt that this interpretation was already prevailing, and his mind was becoming as tormented as a paranoid’s by ideas of reference. Every intercepted glance was a glance of suspicion. Every half-heard word was an accusation.

Fortunately, since the turn of the term, Maggie was no longer in his class, and so he was not compelled to pretend a casual class-room relationship. That would have been a performance far beyond his capability. In his thinking now she had become an ageless and immutable child-woman, assuming an odd infallibility. It was she who could give him lasting assurance. It was she who would save him in the end from the implacable Trajan. And it was she whom he must now see, tonight, in order somehow to survive tomorrow.

In his car, driving, he exercised the same excessive care with which he had walked, as if moving in any way were extremely perilous and imposed the greatest challenge.

At a corner several blocks from headquarters, he saw a phone booth outside a drugstore, and he stopped at the curb in the next block and walked back to the booth and dialed Maggie’s number. The phone rang and rang and wasn’t answered, and after a while he hung up and wondered with despair what he should do.

Now that he had tried and failed to reach her, it was absolutely imperative that he see her and talk with her as soon as possible. Failure to do so, he felt, would surely be disastrous. What he would do, he decided, was go on to her apartment immediately. Perhaps she would be there before him, having arrived while he was on his way. If she wasn’t there, not having arrived, she would certainly be there later, and he would wait until she came.

He returned to his car and drove away, turning after several minutes onto a quiet residential street lighted only at intersections by overhead lamps. He drove slowly along this street for five blocks, watching the street behind him in the rear-view mirror, but there was no one following him, and so he turned off the street onto another in the direction of Maggie’s apartment.

Now, moving toward his destination by the most direct route, he was struck by the realization of how readily and naturally he had assumed the attitude and actions of guilt, looking over his shoulder along a devious way, and he had again the feeling of being unreal, a figure in a grim fantasy and a stranger to himself.

Parking on the street behind Maggie’s apartment house, he walked half around the block and entered the building. He met no one on the street or in the lower hall, and he ascended the stairs quickly to Maggie’s door. His sense of urgency had increased with each step, and when there was no response to his knocking he had a mounting and irrational conviction of everything going irremediably wrong.

Turning away from the door, wondering where he could safely wait without being detected, he reached back at the last instant, as an afterthought, and tried the knob. It turned in his hand, the door swinging inward into the room, and he had in an instant an exorbitant feeling of exhilaration, the unlocked door being a sign that everything might, after all, go right instead of wrong.

But it was only a cruel deception, for terror was waiting for him in the stale litter beyond the door. A light was burning in the ceiling of the kitchen, and Maggie lay on the floor and stared up at the light with blind eyes.

Her head was askew, her throat bruised and her open eyes and mouth gave to her face an expression of childish wonder, as if she had been entranced in the end by the incredible prospect of death. She looked for all the world like a bit of her own litter, dropped casually and left lying.

Fixed for most of a minute in a catalepsy of terror, Brad turned at last with a shrill whimper and ran into the hall and downstairs and out onto the street.

From the dark recess of a doorway across the street, Buddy had seen him come and now saw him go.