Into The Night (15 page)

When they reached the hotel, he got out on his side, closed the door, came around, and opened the one on her side. Before she'd caught on to the maneuver, he'd closed that one after her and they were both out of the car.

"All right if I come up for a minute?" he asked tentatively.

She turned swiftly and faced him. "Don't you think I've had enough for one day? Don't you think I'm tired? Didn't the captain send out word I could go home?"

"You are home," he said.

"Yes, but I want to be there alone, without any"--she looked him resentfully up and down--"supervision."

"I'm off duty."

"You're -never- off duty. You're trying to trip up someone even in your sleep, I bet."

"I'll only stay a minute. Can't I have a cup of coffee?" Then he reminded her, "I bought you a cup of coffee."

"And now you want your ten cents back, I suppose, is that it? Well, come on up." And under her breath she muttered, "I hope you choke on it."

"I'll try," he said accommodatingly, and followed her inside the hotel.

Upstairs, she turned on the element in the serving pantry, drew water and put it on, then came outside again. She flung herself down on the sofa with a moan of unfeigned exhaustion, without even taking off her coat.

"No wonder people break under those things. I mean guilty people."

He came away from the window and sat companionably down without being asked. "Know something? The innocent break quicker than the guilty. They haven't the desperate necessity to cling to their lies."

"Why did he reach out and shake hands with me? The captain, I mean. They don't usually do that with people who are brought in for questioning, do they?"

"He could tell you were a better type," he said glibly.

"No, he wanted to get a look at my hands."

"You're on the ball," he said with a sly smile of admission.

She reached for one of her cigarettes in the guest holder, and deliberately refrained from offering one to him. Then when he held a match for her, she didn't seem to see that either.

"Hate the sight of me, don't you?" he said calmly. "But if the woman who lost her life had been your sister, that would have been different. That would've been my job, my duty. I would've been too lenient if I didn't break everyone's arm in at least three places."

"Well, she wasn't my sister. Thank God for that." She got up and went in to take the boiling water off for the coffee. "How do you take it?" she asked crossly.

"Any way it comes."

I'd like to put some lighter fluid in it, she thought malevolently.

He chuckled as she came back to him with the two cups. "I bet I know what you were thinking just then."

"Even my very thoughts are under cross-examination."

"Oh, don't take it so big," he said wearily. "A girl without a sense of humor is a bore." He drank half his cup down at one swallow. He could do that because he had a very large mouth (in both senses of the word, she hastened to insist upon to herself).

"How'd you come to get mixed up with such a type as that, anyway?" he asked, looking down into his coffee as though trying to make up his mind whether there was enough of it left to make up one decent mouthful.

"I've been over all that twice already. I thought I could get ahead in my songwriting asp--"

"Oh, knock it off," he cut in knowingly. "You're no more interested in songwriting than my"--he changed whatever word he'd been about to use, and finished it--"my armhole. I bet you can't even put two consecutive notes together. The stuff you showed her you probably cribbed from something somebody else composed and published. I picked up one of those masterpieces of yours over there. One of the cops detailed to standby duty happened to know how to play the piano. I tell you the truth, the rings made by the liquor glasses on the score sheets sounded much better than your notes. I know it's a funny thing to do, play the piano with a corpse still on the premises, but if that didn't wake her up we could be sure she was dead for real. Half the guys were holding their hands over their ears and begging him to quit before he even got to the end of it."

"Go ahead," she said with lethal suavity. "Anything else?"

He saw her glance down momentarily at what she was holding in her hands. "Don't throw that. It can give a nasty burn."

She put the steamy cup aside, as if to make sure she wouldn't lose control and let it fly at him after all.

"No, the way I figure you," he went on, sobering, "you're one of these do-gooders. You feel guilty about some real or imaginary wrong you think you've done, and you're trying to work it off in this way, by taking up with beauts like this Nelson."

Although she scarcely moved at all, the sensation she experienced was that of receiving a stunning impact that kited her all the way back against a wall.

He'd only set eyes on her for the first time about four hours ago, and yet he already knew her that well! She kept shaking her head slightly to herself. A glaze of tears even formed in her eyes, without dropping. Tears of amazement, of humility. To think someone had read her that right.

She wondered if they realized, the fellow members of his squad, what they had working for them in this man in the way of instinct, intuitiveness, and ability to read human nature. All just as important to a detective, maybe more so, than technical knowhow and cat-and-mouse stalking. He was a natural at his trade.

And yet this same man, she already knew to a certain extent, off duty could be noisy, frivolous, partial to lowbrow practical jokes, juvenile almost to the point of asininity or inanity.

But it takes many components, she realized, to make up a complete man.

He'd gone back to talking about the case again. "That stunt of pulling the shower curtain across to try to cover up the fact she was in the tub was very stupid," he said reflectively. "The minute I spotted that I knew there had been violence committed. A person taking a shower pulls the curtain across to keep the water from getting on the floor, but a person taking a bath never does."

"The shower curtain--" wasn't pulled across the tub. She caught herself just in time. In the breath space between two words. The shower curtain "--could have been pulled across by her herself if she felt a draft, for instance." Just a double space between two words instead of a single one.

But he was a detective. Was he a detective. "I knew you were up there," he said cheerfully. "I had a pretty good hunch you were, all along, anyway. But this cinches it. Because I heard what it was you -didn't- say just now."

"So it's still going on!" she flared. "Is that what you came up here for?"

He got to his feet. "Why not? Just to satisfy myself. I couldn't get it out of you while you were on guard. I figured maybe I might if you were relaxed and with your guard down."

She looked after him, and he had the door open and was about to leave--without her.

"Does the fact that you think I was over there tonight put me back into the case?" she asked him.

"There isn't any more case," he answered, "to put you back into. The case is closed. It was closed just as I was leaving the precinct house. That's what delayed me."

"But who is it--who was it?" she tried to call out after him.

But he shut the door behind him and left.

The radio didn't carry it until about twenty hours later. It first came on on the 8:00 P.M. news break, and from then on was repeated every half hour until it had ridden out the night. In other words they, Homicide, must have deliberately withheld the news until they were sure beyond any doubt or chance of a slipup. Smitts had already told her the case was closed when he left her door at 12:30 the night before. But that was off the record, so to speak.

It was this angle of it that froze her, frightened her stiff, much more than the news in itself. The murder item had been on the news all day long, but without the definitive arrest. She kept listening and listening, switching from station to station, and it was always the same, just with a change of tired, beat-up adjectives. "The glamorous café singer" was found dead in her tub. "The beautiful café star" was found dead in her bath. "The exotic café performer" was found slain. "Night-life celebrity" discovered lifeless in bath.

"A tramp got croaked," Madeline finished it off for them, with a touch of the toughness she'd learned from Dell herself.

She didn't eat all day. Didn't leave the room all day, because the radio was there. Why had he told her that? Had he been kidding? But why should he want to kid her? She had an impression that he didn't kid about squadroom cases, especially not with outsiders. Well, then, what were they waiting for, what was holding them up?

Twelve times she'd heard that a dog had ridden the earth's orbit in a capsule, and couldn't have cared less. Twelve times what Senator Somebody had said was repeated verbatim, and it hadn't even been good the first time. Twelve times the exact location of Hurricane Hilda was pinpointed. Twelve times Cuba, the Congo, Algeria, Vietnam, and all the pharmacopoeia of the sick and suffering sixties were trotted out on display and then trotted back in again. And twelve times poor Adelaide Nelson was drowned in her bathtub, until the old saw about belaboring a dead horse became almost literal.

The newscasts were like flying saucers circling around her, going away, then coming back again.

Then suddenly it came. Came, went, and was over with.

"An arrest has been made in the Adelaide Nelson slaying. A man named Jack d'Angelo has been brought in and is undergoing questioning."

She cried it out aloud, it was wrenched from her with such shattering violence. "My God! They've got the wrong man! Shiller was the one I sent the note to!"

Thirty minutes went by. She didn't leave the side of the set. Almost picked it up and shook it, like a recalcitrant clock, to get the words out of it more quickly. They'd changed a couple of words in it this time. "... and has been undergoing questioning the greater part of the day."

And then, the following time, "The police are confident they have the right man."

And then, the next time, "He has been formally charged and bound over..."

And then, the time after that, "... one of the quickest in the records of the Police Department. Less than twenty-four hours after the body was found."

"Too quick," she thought, shuddering. "Too quick."

The phone was in her hand.

"Forty-fifth Precinct," a man's voice said.

"Do you have a man there named--uh--well, I guess it would be Smith?"

The voice chuckled, probably in fondness or because it was tired answering nothing but dry duty calls all day long. "Oh, Himself. The quiet one. The mouse. John Francis Xavier Smith. Yeah, he's known around these parts."

She didn't find the camaraderie at all engaging. After all, to be a professional detective, to trap human beings, trick them, trip them up, send them on to be publicly murdered (instead of privately), was for her money simply a hyperthyroid enlargement of the trait of cruelty and penchant for bullying that are to be found latent in almost all adult males. Only, a professional plainclothesman got a salary for doing it. And even a pension, when he got older.

As she stood there at the phone, waiting to tell them they had the wrong man, she was completely on the side of the man on the other end of the line, on the other end of the line from the law, the one against the millions. Only three crimes were worse than the punishment that was meted out; only three crimes deserved it. A crime against a child, the rape of an innocent woman, and a crime against the whole community which threatened it with extinction (espionage in wartime). The rest were pale replicas of the awful majesty of the law, when it set the day and it set the hour, and it said, "You shall die."

Smitts's house was out in a low-wage suburban development, nothing fancy about it but neat arid clean as a whistle. It turned out not to be his, actually, but she hadn't been told that.

He came to the door and let her in.

"You were able to find it all right, I see."

The partner was in the living room when she stepped in there. They had two copper beer cans with neat digs in their tops, two more without, and two glasses going. But they weren't drunk and it wasn't a party, she could tell; they were just relaxing. Some mysterious woman's touch had placed postage-stamp saltine crackers and diminutive wedges of orange cheese on a large thick blue-patterned plate. No man would have cut the bites that small. Both were in shirt sleeves and tieless. "We meet again, Miss Chalmers," the partner said, but rather lukewarmly, as though he preferred spending his off-time among people of his own choosing.

She came out with it without wasting any further time. "The reason I had to see you so badly, the reason I insisted on coming out here, is--you've got to listen to me, you've got to believe me-- you're holding the wrong man in the Nelson case."

It took a minute to sink in.

"Oh," he said then.

He looked at his partner.

Then he looked back at her again.

"Oh, we are?" he said this time. He slung one rock-solid hip onto the edge of the large round table. He folded his arms speculatively. "How do you figure that?" he asked her.

A woman's voice suddenly interrupted, saving her from what would have been a ticklish question to answer, without bringing the knife-in-the-back note into it.

"Smitts," it called down from the head of the stairs, "Evie's ready for her good-night kiss now."

He got up, went outside, and went trooping up the stairs, giving the whole fairly flimsy house the shaking of its life. The chain pulls on the lamps jittered. The very floorboards she was standing on seemed to pulsate a little. Even the water level in the small greenish fishbowl began to oscillate, climbing a little on this side, dipping on that.

"I didn't know he was married," she said artlessly. Or artfully artlessly might be better.

"He ain't," the teammate said. "He lives with his sister and brother-in-law. This is their house. They'd be happy to have him along for the ride, they think that much of him, but he insists on paying for his lodging. That's the kind of guy Smitts is. The kid's crazier about him than her own parents."