Carter closed the door again. “The Laffertys have anything to say?”
Hazel had no lipstick on, and her face was pale. “Oh—they’re saying he might have other enemies besides Gawill.”
“I suppose that’s true—since he was a lawyer.”
“If he has, I don’t know who they are. Neither do the Laffertys.” Hazel got up. She walked slowly toward the kitchen, but she might as well have been walking in the other direction, Carter thought, because she looked quite purposeless and in a daze.
“I should be back in about forty-five minutes,” Carter said, and went out.
When Carter got back, the police had called and wanted him to call them back.
“What did they say?” Carter asked Hazel. He was standing by the kitchen table, unloading two great bags of groceries.
“Fingerprints inconclusive,” Hazel said.
Carter frowned. “How inconclusive?”
“The one they have isn’t very definite. Could be a lot of people’s or something.”
They were going to check him more closely on what he had done on Friday between the office and home, Carter supposed. Carter put everything away in the proper place, frozen orange juice, toilet paper, eggs, bacon, a large sirloin steak for tomorrow—bottom of refrigerator because Hazel didn’t like it frozen—lamb chops, cold cereal, toothpaste, Kleenex, brussels sprouts, and lettuce.
“Aren’t you going to call?’ Hazel asked. She was not yet dressed, sitting on the sofa looking over the Times that Carter had just bought. There was nothing in the Times about David Sullivan.
“Yes, just wanted to get the groceries out of the way.” Carter went to the telephone. Hazel had written the number firmly on the small tablet there and underlined it three times.
“Of all papers to buy, Phil. Couldn’t you have gotten a tabloid at least?”
“I didn’t see anything about it on the front page of the tabloids,” Carter said, which was true. There had been a plane crash in Long Island, and that had the front pages today. He dialed the number. “This is Philip Carter,” he said to the man who answered. “I’d like to talk to Detective Ostreicher.”
Carter was connected quickly.
“Morning, Mr. Carter,” Ostreicher said. “Thank you for calling. I suppose your wife told you about the fingerprint, it’s not too good. Uh— We spoke with the secretary at your office this morning and—she said you left the office about five twenty.”
“Well—it could have been. What did I say, five thirty?”
“Yes,” said Ostreicher, and waited.
Carter waited, too.
“The girl says she knows, because she didn’t leave till five thirty and then got delayed till five thirty-five or something taking letters out to mail—I mention this, because we’re going to have to check on everybody’s time very exactly, you see, since there’s nothing else to go on. And your wife said this morning you could’ve come in at ten past six, she doesn’t remember exactly.”
Another silence for a few seconds.
Had Ostreicher suggested to Hazel he might have been later than he said, Carter wondered, or had she come up with it herself? Hazel was watching him steadily. “She may be right,” Carter said. “I wasn’t looking at my watch.” He might have mentioned stopping for a drink, but Ostreicher might try to check with the barman, and the bar he had stopped at was just south of 38th Street. “Did you want me to come down to the station or something?”
“Oh, no, thanks. We’ll probably talk to you again this weekend. You’ll be around? In town?”
Carter said he would be.
Carter put the telephone down and looked at Hazel. “Asking me more about time,” he said. “Six? Ten past six when I got home? I don’t remember, do you?”
“I think a little after six. I don’t remember exactly,” she said quietly. Hazel usually had something to do on Saturday mornings, letters to write, a trip to the library on 23rd. Now she sat with arms folded.
“I suppose I’ll get on with this office stuff,” Carter said, moving toward the telephone table where the Jenkins and Field pamphlets were. They were material on the Detroit factory that he was supposed to redesign.
Hazel went into the bedroom.
And nothing happened that Saturday.
They had an invitation from Phyllis Millen to a cocktail party on Sunday, but Hazel called around 2 on Sunday and canceled it. Hazel and Phyllis talked a long while, because by then the story was in the papers. The Times and the Herald-Tribune and the Sunday News all mentioned that Mrs. Hazel Carter had allegedly been intimate with David Sullivan, but this piece of information had come from Gregory Gawill, according to all the papers, and Gawill was a self-avowed enemy of Sullivan. It was nice of the police, Carter thought, nice of Detective Ostreicher not to disclose to the press that Hazel had admitted the affair herself. But it was bound to come out somehow in another day or so, and then the finger of suspicion, as all the newspapers called it (which was not pointing in any direction on Sunday, not even at Gawill), would be directed at him. Carter did not listen to Hazel’s conversation with Phyllis. He went into the bedroom and sat at the desk with his office work. Carter doggedly made notes and sketchy diagrams for the Detroit architect he was to work with, not knowing if he would ever get to Detroit. He thought of Hazel telegraphing Sullivan’s parents in Massachusetts yesterday afternoon. The police would have notified the Sullivans, of course, but Hazel had wanted to send a telegram of condolence. “You’ve met them?” Carter had asked. “Oh, yes. Twice. They came down to New York one weekend when I was here in the summer, and David and I drove up to Stockbridge one time and visited them.” She had said it flatly, indifferently to Carter, and Carter had had the lost, left-out feeling he had so often known in prison when Hazel told him, a bit late, about something she had done or was going to do. He thought he remembered something about her meeting Sullivan’s parents, but if she had ever told him she had visited them, he had forgotten it. Now it seemed to Carter she had the concern of a daughter-in-law about expressing her sorrow and her grief over Sullivan’s death.
When the telephone rang at 10:15 that evening, Carter barely noticed, because it had rung so often. But now it was the police, Carter could tell from Hazel’s taut, “Yes . . . yes,” which he heard in the bedroom. He came slowly into the living room.
“Of course. Very fine . . . Good.” She hung up. “The police are coming over,” she said to Carter.
“Do they know anything?”
“They didn’t say.” She stood up.
Timmy had come out of his room into the hall. “Can I stay up, Mommy?”
Hazel pushed her hand through her hair. “Yes. All right. Stay up in your room, if you like, but you shouldn’t come in when the police are here, darling.”
“Why not?”
Hazel shook her head, and she looked about to weep from nerves. “Because we’ll tell you everything they say, I promise you.”
And about the affair, too, Carter wondered, or did Timmy already know about that and take it for granted? What do they mean by “intimate”? Timmy had asked Carter as he was poring over the newspapers, and Carter had answered that it meant that Hazel and David had been very close friends. But Timmy must know intuitively, Carter thought. Carter steered Timmy toward his room again.
“After they leave, we’ll have a chocolate milk and I’ll tell you everything they said,” Carter told him. He took his hand from Timmy’s back, and patted his shoulder. “See you, chum.” Carter went back into the living room. Hazel was standing by the armchair. He put his right arm around her waist and drew her to him, in an impulse to comfort her, but Hazel pulled back.
“Sorry, I’m nervous,” she said.
She went into the bedroom.
Then the bell rang.
It was Ostreicher and the same young officer.
“Well, all day with Gawill and his friends,” Ostreicher said. “Checking their fingerprints, too, of course.”
Carter sat tensely, listening. Ostreicher hadn’t come to make him a report on Gawill, he was sure.
“What about the fingerprints?” Hazel asked.
“There’s only one,” Ostreicher said with a smile. “It could be Mr. Anthony O’Brien’s, it could be your husband’s, it could be—what’s his name? Charles Ewart.” Ostreicher looked at the police officer, who nodded. There were circles under Ostreicher’s eyes.
“Christopher Ewart,” the officer said. He was not taking notes, though his tablet was on his lap, his arms folded.
Anthony was the first name of the fellow who had been at Gawill’s apartment with the blonde, Carter remembered, a muscular fellow who looked like a prizefighter or a football player. It could have been he running down the stairs, Carter supposed, though he hadn’t really been able to tell if the man was brawny or not under the flying overcoat. And Carter winced a little, involuntarily, as he realized that he had known, as soon as he heard Sullivan’s story that night, that whoever it was running down the stairs would get the blame or at least be suspected of Sullivan’s murder, somehow.
“Gawill’s two friends he had dinner with Friday night,” Ost-reicher said, “are a couple of men from New Jersey. One’s a Greek. They were having dinner in a Greek restaurant in Manhattan. We’ve seen both the men. Acquaintances of Gawill’s he doesn’t see very often, apparently, both with jobs and families and anyway their fingerprints are out, don’t match at all.” He took a photograph about six inches square from his tablet. “All we have, you might say—concrete—is this line here and these whorls above it. Arches.”
Carter took the photograph that Ostreicher held out to him, and Hazel got up to look at it over Carter’s shoulder. It was approximately one-third of a fingerprint, a third finger, with a short vertical line running across the whorls near the outer edge. It was certainly fragmentary.
“It could be a part of thousands of people’s fingerprints,” Ostreicher said. “The fingerprint’s a help, a guide. We won’t bother questioning some man without a fingerprint like this.” He smiled briefly.
“What about O’Brien?” Hazel asked. “Who’s he?”
“A barman in Jackson Heights, Friend of Gawill’s. According to O’Brien and his roommate, he came home at five p.m. Friday to his apartment in Jackson Heights, then the roommate went out about five fifteen, and according to O’Brien he stayed in till seven having a shower and a nap, then went out and had a hamburger in the neighborhood and went to the movies. He’s seen the movie, all right, but nobody can definitely say he was in the hamburger place Friday or went to the movie Friday. He could have gone Thursday. The movie was on Thursday, and O’Brien was off Thursday afternoon but working Thursday night, working Friday afternoon but off Friday night. No criminal record, by the way.” Ostreicher drew on his cigarette.
“But you suspect him?” Hazel asked.
Ostreicher cleared his throat and looked at Hazel. “We have to question everybody, Mrs. Carter. There’re one or two people Sullivan knew—one of them in fact whose print this could be—that we’ve found, so far—shady, questionable—and remote.” He smiled in a resigned way. “This was a murder of passion—either of the person who did it or the person who hired him to do it. Any lawyer can be hated by the man he’s about to ruin. Mr. Sullivan had such a case coming up, but nobody kills the lawyer for that, they kill the person who’s hiring the lawyer, don’t they?” Ost-reicher unbuttoned his jacket. “The situation would seem to leave Gawill—and you, Mr. Carter.”
“And—what’re you going to do about O’Brien’s story, for instance? His alibi?” Hazel asked.
“Keep checking it,” Ostreicher said. “Keep watching him, along with some others. Watch for the movements of money in people’s bank accounts, watch the people themselves, who they see and talk to. The usual. We should have something in a couple of days,” he finished, on a more cheerful note.
“And what about the one named Ewart?” she asked.
“Ewart joined Gawill and the other two Friday night at the restaurant. Another New Jerseyite, a car salesman. I only mentioned him, because it could be his print, too. But he’s got an alibi. He was getting his car serviced in New Jersey from five till nearly six. We checked with the garage. Then he went to the restaurant in Manhattan.” Ostreicher sighed and looked into space. “Gawill could have hired somebody. We’re going to look into his bank accounts tomorrow morning.”
“I doubt if he’d be stupid enough to show anything there,” Carter said.
“We’ll look anyway.” Ostreicher smiled his twinkling smile. “Mr. Carter, you’re right-handed?”
“Yes,” Carter said. He knew the fingerprint was of the third finger of a right hand.
“Not any stronger in one hand than the other—because of your thumb injuries?”
“No.” His left thumb hurt less, but that didn’t make the hand any stronger.
“I must ask you both again,” Ostreicher said, leaning forward in his chair, “if you had made any plan or come to any decision or agreement—even a peaceful one—about the future with you,” with a nod at Hazel, “and you,” a nod at Carter, “and Mr. Sullivan because of the talks you had about it this past week?”
Hazel answered first. “We came to no agreement. Maybe that’s worse than coming to one.”
“Not necessarily.— I’ve told you, according to Gawill, Mr. Carter was furious, but don’t think I believe anything Gawill tells me.” He turned to Carter. “You had no idea about talking to Mr. Sullivan about the situation?”
“Well, yes,” Carter said slowly. “I tried to see him Tuesday night, as Gawill must have told you. That was the evening I saw my wife on the sidewalk—on her way to see him.” He sat up straighter and said with an effort at calmness, “I did want to talk to Sullivan to ask him if it was true the affair was still going on and to ask him what he intended to do about it—now that I knew about it. But I never saw him that night.”
“No. Gawill told me.” Ostreicher gave a small smile. “You didn’t try to see Mr. Sullivan after that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because—seeing my wife visiting him was perhaps part of the answer I wanted,” Carter said. “Any more talking, I preferred to do with my wife.”
“Did you? Why?” Ostreicher asked in a dull, automatic way, as if he were not interested in the answers. Or as if he didn’t believe Carter’s last reply.
“Because—I felt what Sullivan wanted to do or was doing, having an affair with a married woman, was his business, but I did have a right to ask my wife what she intended to do—because she’s my wife.”
Ostreicher nodded and smiled his little smile that looked like disbelief. “What did you intend to do, Mrs. Carter?”
Carter saw the troubled, tortured expression come over Hazel’s face. How could one have one’s cake and eat it, too?
“I honestly don’t know,” Hazel said. “I was confused Tuesday night. I suppose I would have given David up, yes.”
“But you didn’t say that to your husband?”
“No. Not plainly.”
Ostreicher sighed. “Did you discuss it with Mr. Sullivan Tuesday night?”
“No,” Hazel said.
“Didn’t you tell him you’d just seen your husband on the sidewalk out in front?”
Hazel shook her head quickly. “No.” She looked suddenly at Carter. “Don’t you think you should tell Mr. Ostreicher about Gawill’s dope? Just the fact that he had it?”
“Dope?” said Ostreicher.
“Yes,” Carter said. “He offered me some dope—heroin—and I took some, twice. I had to take morphine in the hospital—in prison—for my thumbs. Gawill had quite a bit.”
“How much?”
“It looked like more than two hundred plastic ampoules. Liquid form. Each held ten grains, Gawill told me.”
Ostreicher frowned. “He hasn’t got it now. We searched that apartment.— Why did you take it, Mr. Carter?”
Carter drew a breath. “It helps kill the pain in my thumbs. I also enjoy it.”
“You took it on two occasions, you said. Are you in the habit of taking it? From day to day?”
“No. The pills I’m taking do well enough, and they have a morphine base, matter of fact.” He glanced at Hazel. “I take about four a day, sometimes six, and I suppose that amounts to two or three grains of morphine.”
“Didn’t you think it unusual that Gawill had so much dope in his apartment?” Ostreicher asked. “I presume that’s where you took it. Where did you think he got it from?”
“I did think it was unusual. But considering the people he goes with—” Carter shrugged. “I didn’t ask Gawill any questions, because that wasn’t why I went to see him.”
“You didn’t try to make any guesses as to where he might have got it?”
“No. I didn’t care.” Carter felt the disapproval of Hazel and also of Ostreicher at that remark: the possession of heroin was illegal, and he had not only not reported it, but had enjoyed some himself. “I was trying to get some information out of Gawill. I didn’t want to antagonize him—frankly.”
“You might have mentioned it to me before now,” Ostreicher said, and looked at his colleague Charles, who was writing in his tablet. “This opens up dope-handlers now. A messy batch and lots of ’em.” He shook his head, as if contemplating in dismay a new field of action, but he wasn’t moving toward the telephone.