17
At 5:40 he took a taxi to Gawill’s complicated address in Jackson Heights, and was let out in a street of gloomy red-brick buildings, all alike, all sitting at an obtuse angle to the street but touching one another, and all about eight stories high. Gawill’s downstairs hall was full of baby carriages and there was a smell of cooking. He took the elevator to the sixth floor.
“Hello, Phil,” Gawill said affably as he opened the door. He was in shirtsleeves, a cigarette in his mouth. “Come on in.”
Carter went into a living room full of cheap, newish furniture which, like the painting reproductions on the wall, managed to have no personality whatsoever. Gawill offered him a drink. Carter tossed his topcoat on one end of an ugly green sofa. There was a hall that led to another room. “Are we alone or is somebody else here?”
“Oh, we’re alone. Thought you’d rather be.” Gawill came back from the kitchen with two drinks. “I’ve got what you’re interested in right here.” He moved to the round coffee table in front of the sofa. On the coffee table lay, between two laden ashtrays, a worn brown-paper envelope with an untied string. It bulged. Gawill sat down on the sofa. “These notes,” he said, pulling out a messy handful. “Well, like I said, they’re mostly on Sullivan, but they’ve got a few times and names of other people, times when they came to see him, I mean.”
After a little more of Gawill’s mumbling, Carter said, “I wish you’d just hand me what’s pertinent and let me see it.”
“Here, for instance, June twenty-seventh, three years ago, ‘Mrs. Carter arrived four thirty-five p.m., left at six.’ That’s at Sullivan’s, when she was going to school in Long Island, telling your son, I suppose, she didn’t get off from school till five or so, because she kept it up pretty regular. Here we have again, ‘Mrs. C. arrives four thirty-five, leaves six twenty.’” He fumbled in the notes. “‘S. enters house nine fifty p.m. with Mrs. C. She leaves midnight, S. puts her in taxi.’ One year ago.” Gawill leaned forward to hand Carter the note.
Gawill produced six more. The latest time Hazel had left his apartment was at 2 a.m., and that had been with two other people, when Sullivan had been giving a party.
“But you know, lateness don’t matter,” Gawill said with a smile.
Carter had to smile, too. “I don’t see anything to get excited about—in anything you’ve got here.” Carter felt bored and vaguely angry, but the anger, he realized, was anger with himself for having bothered to come here.
Gawill looked surprised and disappointed. “You don’t. Well, maybe you’d like to hear the tapes.” He got up and went to the closet near the front door. He dragged out a heavy-looking box, then still another box from behind it. The second box was full of rolled tapes, two long rows of them—long, if Gawill didn’t know what he was looking for, and he didn’t seem to. He stooped by the tape box, murmuring, “Got into Sullivan’s house twice, once to put the machine in, once to take it out. Let’s see here. Marchand—” He put it back and pulled out another. “More Marchand. Another of my chums,” he said with sarcasm.
Carter drew on his cigarette. Gawill was a mental case, a paranoid, Carter thought, and Sullivan’s investigations must have added a lot of fuel to the fire. Carter looked again at the sordid heap of notes on the sofa cushion. How many other dirty brown envelopes did Gawill have on his other persecutors? And how much money had he paid to get all this junk? Enough to keep him half broke, evidently, and in a cheap apartment.
“Ah, here they are,” said Gawill. “Sullivan—”
It took him several minutes to put the tape on the machine. Carter listened, smiling, to the first few incomplete conversations between Sullivan and his cleaners’ delivery boy, who had come with a suit but without a white dinner jacket that Sullivan had expected. A door slammed and there was silence.
“Come on, Greg, speed it up,” Carter said.
“Can’t speed it up, you’ll miss something,” said Gawill, hunched avidly over his machine on the floor.
Sullivan making a restaurant reservation on the telephone. For two at 9 o’clock.
“We put the machine right near the telephone,” Gawill put in.
Another long pause.
“Wait,” Gawill said, and speeded up the tape until it struck voices, then went back. Hazel was arriving at Sullivan’s.
“How are you, darling,” Sullivan said.
“Fine, and you?” Hazel replied. “What a day!”
“I had to make the dinner at nine, because there was nothing at eight,” Sullivan said. “Okay, honey?”
“I don’t mind. Gives us a little more time. I wouldn’t mind taking my shoes off.”
Sullivan laughed a little. “Do that. Get you a drink?”
“No, thanks. Not yet.”
“Darling.”
Maybe they kissed, maybe they didn’t. The silence sounded like it to Carter.
“Get that,” said Gawill.
“Oh, come on. Why didn’t you put it in the bedroom if you were trying to prove something?” Carter said with a laugh.
“Timmy going to be all right?” Sullivan asked.
“He’s staying the night with one of his school friends,” Hazel said.
“Ah-h, great,” from Sullivan.
Their two voices faded away and vanished.
“Get that,” Gawill said. “This tape is last October.”
Carter knew Hazel’s voice, her moods. She had talked to him in the same way many times.
Gawill clicked the machine off. “Timmy staying the night with one of his school friends.” He nodded meaningfully.
Carter opened his shaky hands. “He does that every now and then, if we’ve got a late night somewhere.”
“Ah, come on. You weren’t born yesterday,” Gawill said.
Carter smiled wryly. No, he wasn’t. And the tape was last October. He could see the date on the spool himself, unless Gawill was faking the date.
Gawill seized his glass and fixed him another. “You ought to let me tip you off some late afternoon when she’s with Sullivan, and you go over and—” Gawill set the drink down firmly on the coffee table.
“And?”
“Ah—throttle him right in his bed.”
Carter’s forehead felt cool with perspiration. “I think you hate him much more than I do. You’ll beat me to it.”
“I think you ought to do it. You’ve got the moral right.”
Carter laughed. “Come on. The honor is yours.”
Gawill studied his face.
Carter finally looked down at his glass. He passed his fingers over his moist forehead. The faint sweat reminded him of withdrawal symptoms in the prison ward.
“How about a shot?” Gawill asked. “I’ve got some in the bathroom. Horse.”
Carter sat back, took a long time to answer, but he knew what his answer would be. “Why not?”
“It’s not in the bathroom, but I’ll get it,” said Gawill, going off briskly like a good host, going into his bedroom down the hall.
Carter stood up. He heard Gawill in the bathroom now. He went in.
Gawill had the box on the floor, a cardboard box about two feet square with some forty ampoules laid in compartments in cotton on the top layer of the box. If the box were full, Carter thought, there were at least two hundred and forty ampoules in it.
“Each one is ten grains,” Gawill said, laying a hypodermic needle on the edge of the basin. “Dunno if you want a whole one.” He smiled genially and went out of the bathroom.
Carter moved automatically, and the stuff was in a vein in his forearm in a matter of seconds, though the ampoule and the new square needle were different from the prison ward equipment. He took slightly more than half the plastic ampoule. Where did Gawill get all the stuff, Carter wondered, and thought it would be undiplomatic to ask
. But it was a lucrative business and explained why Gawill could hire private detectives, or crooked facsimiles. Carter looked and saw that there were at least six layers of ampoules, and at a modest price on the junkies’ market, the box was worth six thousand dollars. Carter walked back into the living room.
“If you want a couple of shots to take home,” Gawill said, nodding toward the bathroom, “help yourself.”
Carter smiled. “No, thanks, Greg.” The shot was going through his veins, strong and familiar. Carter sat down comfortably in an armchair.
Gawill got up and handed him his drink. Carter no longer wanted it or needed it, but he took it.
“Seriously, Phil, you’re the person who could erase Mr. Sullivan and go scot-free—legally speaking,” Gawill said quietly.
Carter frowned and laughed. “With a prison record behind me?”
“A man has the right to—”
“Doesn’t that particular law apply only in Texas?”
Gawill subsided and rubbed a hand across his mouth. “We could always make it look as if one of my friends did it. And then they wouldn’t have—you see—so what could the law do there? You might be suspected, but—” Gawill paused.
Gawill wasn’t making sense, but Carter imagined himself delivering a sidewise blow to the front of Sullivan’s throat, Alex’s blow to kill. “I should think I would be suspected, if I did it,” Carter said, looking at his wristwatch. A quarter to 7. Hazel would be wondering where he was. He hadn’t left any note at home. “Or even if I didn’t,” he added.
“Think it over, Phil. We could work out something. You’ve got cause. You won’t stop their affair until you do, you know.”
Carter kept calm. But he felt scared, and his heart was beating faster. It was like a lot of moments in prison, when he had been physically threatened, or just before a blow of some kind really landed—the way he had felt sometimes with his back turned to Squiff in Max’s cell. “I think I’ll leave the job to you,” Carter said, getting up.
“Oh, no, I’m leaving it to you.”
Carter laughed.
So did Gawill. Gawill got up and reached in his hip pocket. He pulled out his wallet and took a photograph from it. “A present for you. The date’s on the back.”
Carter took it. It was a photograph of Hazel, back view, hatless and in a coat, going up the steps of what looked like Sullivan’s 38th Street house. Carter turned it over and read, “Jan. 4th 4:30 p.m.” Carter said, “She works till five thirty usually.” Then, interrupting Gawill’s interruption, “I’ve called her many times in her office just after five. I know.”
“Sullivan’s supposed to, too. They can arrange things now and then, though. Love will find a way, like they say. You can’t just deny that photograph, can you?”
Carter shrugged and tossed the photograph down on the coffee table. Hazel was in the dark brown coat with black fur collar and cuffs that she had worn to work most days this winter. Carter felt sickish.
“All right,” Gawill said, clapping his shoulder. “You know it’s true. All right, I’ll race you for the pleasure of wasting Mr. Sullivan, but I think you’ll win.”
“Good night, Greg.” Carter walked to the door.
Gawill was there first and opened it for him. “See you again, Phil.”
Hazel was in the kitchen when Carter got home.
“Hi,” she called. “Where’ve you been?”
He crossed the living room floor and stood near the kitchen door. “Just out,” he said. “Taking a walk.”
She glanced at him, then looked back at what she was doing—opening a package of frozen peas.
He could have turned away then, since she wasn’t pursuing the questioning, but he kept looking at her, could not take his eyes from her for several seconds. She looked over her shoulder at him again, and then he turned. Carter hung up his overcoat, then started into the bathroom. He looked through the open door of Timmy’s room. Timmy was lying on his stomach on the floor, doing his homework, a place he preferred to his worktable. Carter saw that his right hand was bandaged.
“Hi, Timmy. What happened to your hand?”
“Oh—fell on the playground playing handball this afternoon.”
“Oh. A scrape? Is it bad?”
“No, it’s a cut. I hit a piece of glass or something, but it’s not bad.” Timmy did not look up as he said that.
Carter hesitated a moment, then went on into the bathroom. He washed his hands with soap, then he washed his face. He felt quite well. Hazel might be having an affair with Sullivan now—she was quite a busy woman these days—but the heroin made him feel very well, as if the world were still right side up. It was a strange comfort to Carter, too, that Gawill knew about the affair, had always known, and yet obviously it hadn’t turned his world upside down, hadn’t shocked him too much. Gawill even had a bit of humor about it: love will find a way. Yes, it would take more than his coming home from prison to interrupt the course of true love.
He went back into the kitchen and said, “Like a drink before dinner?”
“No, thanks. Have one yourself.”
“No, thanks.”
She was making something in a casserole with salmon and peas. She looked at it in the oven, then closed the oven door again. “Where were you really just now?” she asked.
Carter blinked at her challenge, but he kept perfectly calm. She was acting as guilty as Sullivan, he thought, and of course for the same reason. “Out for a walk,” Carter said, rather challengingly himself, before he thought what he was saying. But he let it stand. He turned and walked into the living room.
18
“David’s told me quite a lot about you already,” Butterworth said, but he continued to read the résumé that Carter had brought with him.
Butterworth sat behind a large desk on which were some blueprints and a model of what looked like some toolmaking machine. Butterworth looked about forty-five, but he was quite bald except for a fringe of black hair. His mouth was soft, not in the sense of being weak but of being gentle, and Carter was oddly reminded of Hazel’s mouth when he looked at it. Jenkins and Field were consulting engineers, and Carter had gathered that his job would be to handle some of the work that Butterworth was too busy to do. Butterworth was often sent to other cities, and some of this work would fall to him, if he got the job. The job paid fifteen thousand a year, with a month’s vacation in summer.
“Well, Mr. Carter, the position is yours if you’d like to take it,” Butterworth said.
“Thanks. I think I would.”
Butterworth glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. “David told me about your . . . time in prison down south. I understand it was none of your fault. The guilty one was the man who died.”
Carter nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Terrible thing,” Butterworth murmured. “But I wanted to tell you that I know about it, we all know about it here and—we all know David, I know him better than the others, and if David says you’re a good man, you’re a good man, as far as I’m concerned.” He smiled, awkwardly, as if he were unused to smiling. “I think even real—jailbirds might be given a second chance sometimes. Most people aren’t willing to. And you’re not that, I realize. I think you’ll do better work for us if you know we know about it and we’re not having any—lurking reservations about you.”
Carter walked out of the office in a quiet glow. He went into the first telephone booth and called Sullivan. “Hello, David. I just wanted to thank you. I got it.”
“Oh, great, great,” Sullivan’s smooth tenor voice said. “When do you start?”
“Monday morning.”
“I’ve got to go now, somebody waiting to talk to me. Congratulations, Phil, and I’ll see you very soon.”
Hazel was delighted that he had got the job, and that evening at the Elliotts’ the
y toasted it with champagne. The Elliotts insisted on bringing out a bottle of the best from their cellar after dinner. Timmy had a glass, too, and Carter thought his son looked at him with a new respect that evening, because he had a job like other kids’ fathers. But the job had come through Sullivan. Timmy knew that, too. One up, one more up for Mr. Sullivan.
Carter could not get to sleep that night. Hazel had been tired, and she slept soundly beside him in the double bed in one of the Elliotts’ guestrooms, where they had spent other nights. There was a mournful wind outside. He put on his suit over his pajamas without making a sound, and went downstairs. Carter walked out on the lawn. The wind made him less nervous when he could face it.
The tops of the tall maples and the hickory sycamores nodded and swayed, like the heads of exhausted people being tortured and buffeted. He stared at the house and thought it very strange that he had been invited here. The evening seemed strange, too, like something that had either not really happened, or that had happened years ago.
“Phil?”
Hazel’s voice caught him by surprise. It sounded as if she were right beside him. Then he saw her pale figure in her nightgown, small in the tall window in the right upper corner of the house. He suddenly felt he did not know her. It shocked him and frightened him. It was like the wind, blowing his identity away. But he walked automatically toward the house, looking up at her.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked, softly, as if she were afraid of waking other people in the house.
Awkwardly he waved to her, in an effort to be reassuring. She really belongs to Sullivan, he thought suddenly. He didn’t know her at all. He stopped, limp as a rag, nothing.
“Are you all right?”
He stared at her. “I’ll be up.”
19
Sullivan was invited for dinner on the Tuesday of Carter’s first week at Jenkins and Field. Hazel made an effort with the dinner—cold cucumber soup, a complicated veal and bacon and grated cheese dish, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and a lemon soufflé for dessert. She was in a good mood.