At the head of the alley he propped the body in a sitting position against the house wall. This was the most dangerous moment — the moment of getting it into the car. Corey was very obviously dead. No one close enough to see him clearly would mistake him for a Christmas drunk.
Mark moved to the corner, glanced out and then flattened himself back against the wall. Across the street, behind the Cadillac, a woman in a leopard-skin coat was walking a Doberman Pinscher on a leash. Mark had been alone so long that, although the street separated them, she seemed frighteningly close. And the dog … Did dogs smell corpses? Would it raise its nose, sniff, drag its mistress across the street? The fantastic notion and his extreme reaction to it warned him that his nervous energy was more nearly exhausted than he had supposed. He stood, close to the wall. Corey’s shoulder sagged, limp, against the back of his knee.
The woman paraded up and down, her leopard collar flapped up to protect her from the snow. The dog was snuffing listlessly along the sidewalk. At last it strained towards a snow-capped fire-hydrant and lifted its leg.
‘Good doggie; good Eisenhower.’
The woman’s voice seemed shatteringly loud. She bent and patted the dog, which looked up at her, foolishly lolling its tongue. She started away down the street, with the Doberman pulling her forward.
No one else was in sight. He moved to the car and opened the rear door. An automobile rug was on the back seat. He threw it over the front seat and, returning to the alley, hauled Corey up to a standing position, then, in a clumsy rush, impelled him across the sidewalk and toppled him into the back seat. He managed to cram the body down on the floor and threw the rug over it.
Sweating in spite of the cold, he drove to the garage and swerved the car up the ramp. As the office flashed by, he glanced inside it. Joe did not seem to be there. On the second floor he parked just outside the sliding doors which led to Dead Storage. He got out and stood, straining his ears. In the dank silence he could hear an occasional echoing clank of metal from below. Joe was still at work. His luck hadn’t deserted him yet.
With a speed that now had in it a touch of hysteria, he maneuvered the body out of the car and half dragged, half carried it the few feet into the darkness of the Dead Storage room. He parked the Cadillac in its original position and returned to the body. He resisted the temptation to dump it in the nearest car. It would be safer to choose one deeper in the spectral phalanx.
He walked along a row of shadowy, jacked-up automobiles and selected one at random near the end of the line. It was a station wagon. He could just make out its sleek contours. He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He returned to the body and lugged it to the wagon. Bracing himself, he lifted it and tried to push it into the rear seat, but it sank back on him, pinioning him against the side of the adjoining automobile. He slid out from under it, and climbed into the station wagon’s back seat. From inside, he reached out and, grabbing the body, tugged and wrenched at it, gradually pulling it in towards him.
There was something about that silent battle which, for the first time since he had left the apartment, kindled horror in him. The full realization suddenly returned that this senseless, passive antagonist was Corey Lathrop, important business executive, well-known New York social figure, Ellie’s ex-fiancé, who had been killed in Ellie’s apartment. Downstairs, pottering with an automobile, was the garage attendant, representing law and retribution for the law-breaker. Surely, at any moment, he would hear Joe’s footsteps clattering towards him over the oil-stained cement.
But no sounds came.
With one last jerk, he managed to drag Corey fully on to the floor of the back seat. He himself was squashed up, somehow, on the seat itself. He crawled over the body and out of the car. If there had been a rug in the station wagon it would have been better. But, crammed down on the floor, Corey certainly would not be visible from outside. No one would find him unless, for any reason, they looked inside the car itself.
He knew he had already spent too much time up here, but he lingered, reviewing every move he had made, assuring himself that nothing had been overlooked. Satisfied, he slipped out of the Dead Storage room and, turning up his coat collar, walked through the central aisle past the cars and down the ramp.
As he reached the foot of the ramp Joe was coming through the cars towards him carrying a spanner. Mark suppressed an impulse, born of physical debilitation, to run out of the garage. It didn’t matter very much now whether Joe saw him or not. So many other patrons would have come in and out so many times before the body was discovered.
The attendant’s young face, beneath tousled red hair, was sleepy and bored.
‘Hiyah, Mr Liddon. Thought I heard a car just come in. Cold enough for you?’
‘Hi, Joe.’
‘Personally I like a White Christmas myself. Nice for the kids.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, good night, Mr Liddon.’
‘Good night, Joe.’
‘Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon.’
Mark went out into the falling snow.
A few minutes later he was back in the apartment. He went straight up to the bar. He found that there wasn’t much blood and what there was had missed the central rug and merely stained the marbleized floor. He wiped it up with a wet rag, rinsed the rag out in the kitchen and dropped it in the trash can.
He poured himself a drink of water from the tap and sat down on a white enamel kitchen chair. He was feeling lightheaded from fatigue, but the almost automatic calm had not deserted him. Okay, he had carried out the first half of what had to be done. The body was safely stowed away until he chose to have it revealed. Now it remained to find Ellie.
He tried gropingly to project himself into her mind. After something so terrible had happened, what sort of place would have meant safety to her? Some friends’ house, maybe? But he didn’t know her friends. A threatening blank wall seemed to loom in front of him. If only he knew Ellie better! That was the ironical part of it. He loved her, he thought he understood her, he knew every nuance of her body, the little mole under her left shoulder blade, the pattern of white and golden suntan on her skin. But he didn’t really know her as a husband can know a wife. How could he? He hadn’t had the time.
Suddenly his mind wouldn’t function. If he tried to think any more now he might panic. It was better to put everything off till morning and get some sleep.
He was half-way through the living-room on his way to bed when he thought of Corey’s overcoat. Obviously Corey would not have come here through the snow without a hat and coat. He opened the hall closet and saw there an unfamiliar snap brim brown felt hat, a Burberry and a small black briefcase. The sight of them as nearly defeated him as anything that had happened that evening. He knew that they would have to be disposed of. Now that he was irrevocably committed to the course of obliterating all connection between Corey and the apartment, it was far too dangerous to leave things here. He picked up the briefcase and unzipped it. It was full of papers. Almost certainly they would make a direct link with Corey. He tossed them on the hall table. He would burn them later.
He put on Corey’s Burberry over his own coat. He tried on the hat. It was too small. He squashed it into a ball and pushed it into a pocket.
With the briefcase under his arm, he made his third trip by way of the service elevator into the desolate world outside. It was after four; the dead hour of New York. He didn’t pass a soul as he forced his rebelling body crosstown to the river and then downtown ten blocks. At the end of a sidestreet below Sutton Place he took off Corey’s coat and dumped it with the briefcase into the river.
It was exactly five o’clock when he returned for the last time to the apartment. There were still the papers. He took them into the living-room, and, hardly able to keep his eyes open, glanced through them. There were minutes of a board meeting, and a lot of technical manuscripts which he didn’t try to understand. They might well have been of major importance to the Ross Steel Products Company, but he couldn’t concern himself about that.
He pulled the fire screen from the hearth and deliberately, one by one, burnt all the papers and dispersed the ashes in the grate.
He turned off the lights, moved into the bedroom, stripped off all his clothes and, naked, dropped into Ellie’s tumbled pink sheets.
Suddenly, as if some tap had been opened, anxieties flooded through him, dispelling his great fatigue. He had done what he had been able to do for Ellie. But what did it amount to? At the time it had all seemed planned, efficient, almost heroically sound; all traces, it seemed, of Corey’s visit to the apartment had been erased.
Now, with a merciless clarity, he saw that the ark of safety he had built for his wife was as riddled with holes as a sieve. Corey Lathrop was an important man, with secretaries and dozens of friends. Why wouldn’t one of them know that he had planned to visit Ellie that evening? His disappearance would be reported tomorrow. Why wouldn’t the police make a bee-line for Ellie’s apartment? Why wouldn’t an elevator operator remember taking Corey up to the penthouse? Why…? There were a thousand ‘whys.’
Until then he had succeeded in keeping from thinking emotionally about his wife. But now she leaped into reality as vividly as if she were in the bed with him, and his love and fear for her clutched at him. Where was she? The poor, frightened kid, what was she suffering?
He twisted on to his side and his hand touched something. His fingers curved around it and picked it up. It was Ellie’s brassiere.
‘What a homecoming,’ he thought. ‘What a hell of a homecoming …’
MARK LIDDON woke up. For an instant he confused the scarlet bed canopy with mosquito netting and was back in Venezuela. Then he remembered where he was and what had happened. He looked at his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. He had slept less than four hours, but it seemed to him that he had been recklessly wasting time. There was so much to do.
He got out of bed and put on his grey bathrobe. Outside the window the rooftops of Manhattan gleamed white like great frosted cakes. It was not actually snowing, but the heavy grey of the sky indicated that the storm was not over. The brief sleep had restored his thoughts to their normal coherence. He had to find Ellie before the police found Corey, or everything he had done for her, instead of helping her, would boomerang on them both. It was as simple as that.
He went into the living-room and inspected the fireplace to be sure that he had efficiently burned Corey’s papers the night before. Satisfied, he went up to the bar and studied the area of floor which had been bloodstained. He had done a better job than he had thought. Police analysis might be able to detect blood, but there was nothing visible to the human eye.
He thought of the rag with which he’d cleaned up the night before. Going into the kitchen, he picked it out of the trash can and put it down the chute which led directly to the apartment house incinerator. If he had thought of the chute last night, he could probably have disposed of Corey’s coat and briefcase that way. But, until he met Ellie, his New York days had been spent in cheap walk-ups. The chute was still exotic to him. In the emergency he had reverted to the technique of poverty.
By now Ingeborg, the Swedish maid, should have arrived. She might know something of Ellie’s whereabouts. He prepared coffee and put the percolator on the stove. Ingeborg still hadn’t come by the time he finished breakfast. In the bedroom he found the maid’s number in Ellie’s telephone book. A woman’s voice, heavily accented, answered his ring. No, it wasn’t Ingeborg; it was her sister. Ingeborg was in Atlantic City. Hadn’t Mrs Liddon told Mr Liddon that she had given Ingeborg two weeks off for Christmas? Hadn’t Mrs Liddon told Mr Liddon that she was going away?
‘Going away?’ echoed Mark.
‘Yas. She tell Ingeborg she oughtta take a vacation too, have a good time for Christmas.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Since two days. Since two days Ingeborg is in Atlantic City.’
‘Two days ago. Did Mrs Liddon go away two days ago too?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Know where she went?’
‘Ingeborg don’t know. She says Mrs Liddon just says she’s going away.’ The voice added anxiously: ‘You want I should tell you Ingeborg’s address? You want she should come back?’
‘No. No, thanks.’
‘If you want I should tell …’
‘No. It’s okay.’
‘Okay, then. Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon.’
‘Merry Christmas.’
Mark put down the receiver. Ellie had sent Ingeborg away two days ago and had said she was going away too. Why shouldn’t it be true? She hadn’t expected him for two weeks.
Knowing Ellie, it was fantastic to suppose that she would have planned to spend Christmas in a lonely apartment. For the first time, he thought that perhaps his wife hadn’t killed Corey Lathrop. He was too cautious to give hope full rein, but the dark pall was lifting.
Maybe he had invented a nightmare for Ellie and himself which had never really existed. If she’d gone away two days ago, she was definitely in the clear. She could have lent Corey the apartment in her absence. Corey, as a parole officer, could have run into trouble with one of his pet redeemed convicts. Yes, it might have easily happened that way.
His spirits soared. But he wasn’t going to let optimism run away with him. Perhaps Ellie had left two days ago. But he would still have to find her and make sure everything was all right before he could think about going to the police.
And finding her, even if she were innocently off on a trip, would not be easy. She had as many ‘favorite’ places as she had ‘favorite’ friends — Palm Beach, La Jolla, Sun Valley. Distance didn’t exist for her. She would jump a plane to Hawaii if she felt in the mood.
He thought of asking around in the apartment house — the elevator boy, the doormen. But he decided against it. Until he knew more than he did now it might be risky.
Perhaps her parents would know something, although it wasn’t likely. Ellie had turned her back on the Rosses and all they stood for some years ago, and ever since their contemptuous rejection of Mark as a son-in-law she’d been hardly on speaking terms with them. But, unwelcome though he would be at Gramercy Park, it was the most obvious place to try first.