Glass Cell (18 page)

22

Carter answered the telephone when it rang at half past 10.

“Detective Ostreicher here. Is this Mr. Carter?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like to talk to you and your wife for a few minutes tonight, if that’s convenient?” said the pleasant, crisp voice.

“Yes, of course.”

“We’ll be over in ten minutes.”

Hazel was standing in the doorway in her nightdress.

“The police. They’re coming over to talk to us,” Carter said.

“Did they say anything else?”

“No.”

She went back into the bedroom. Her light had not been off.

Carter emptied an ashtray and straightened some newspapers on the sofa.

The police arrived in less than ten minutes. Detective Ost-reicher was a husky, blue-eyed young man who looked still in his twenties. With him was a dark-haired police officer, also rather young. Hazel came into the living room in her dark blue robe, and sat on the sofa. The two men sat down, after they had removed their overcoats, and each pulled out a tablet and ballpoint pen.

They asked first for Carter’s name, age, occupation, and place of work, then Hazel’s.

“Where were you today between five and seven o’clock, Mr. Carter?” Ostreicher asked calmly, his pen poised. “These are routine questions we’re asking all Mr. Sullivan’s friends.”

“I was at the office, then I came home,” Carter said. “I got home around six.”

“Can you tell us your exact movements? Your office is on Second and Forty-seventh, you said.”

“Yes. I took the Second Avenue bus down.”

“What time was that?”

“About—five thirty, I think.” It had been a couple of minutes earlier, Carter realized. “The bus was crowded. I had to wait a few minutes for it. Then I got off before my stop—at Thirty-fourth Street—and walked home. Bought a newspaper—”

“Why did you get off there?”

“The bus was crowded. I thought I’d walk the six blocks.”

“You were home when he got home, Mrs. Carter?”

“Yes.”

“Does that tally? He got home around six?”

Hazel nodded slowly. “Yes.”

She could have said it was 6:10, Carter thought, if she had noticed, but maybe she hadn’t noticed.

“When did you last see Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Carter?”

Carter turned automatically to Hazel. “Wasn’t it when he last came to dinner?”

“Yes. About ten days ago,” Hazel said.

Hazel had seen him since, and they were going to spring that business in another second, Carter thought. He rubbed his palms nervously and slowly together between his knees, his pinkish thumbs up. He sat on a straight chair.

“And you, Mrs. Carter?”

“I saw him—Tuesday.”

“Tuesday evening?” asked Ostreicher.

“Yes.”

“Uh—you were in the habit of seeing Mr. Sullivan when your husband was not present, Mrs. Carter?”

Hazel rolled her head against the back of the armchair. “I’m sure I know what Gawill told you, so let’s not beat around the bush.”

“Is it true, Mrs. Carter?”

“Some of it’s true.”

“You were having an affair?”

“We were having an affair, yes.”

“With your husband’s consent?” Ostreicher looked at Carter.

Carter did not change his expression, or he didn’t think he did. He stared at some place in the middle of the coffeetable.

“Not entirely with my husband’s consent, no.”

“And you had some discussion about that—Tuesday night?”

“Yes. Late Tuesday night—when I came home.”

Another glance from Ostreicher to Carter. “Did your husband make any threats against Mr. Sullivan then or at any other time?”

“No,” Hazel said.

Ostreicher looked at Carter. “Mr. Carter, what was your honest attitude toward Mr. Sullivan? Your feeling toward him?”

Carter opened his hands. “I—” Suddenly he had no words at all. But Ostreicher was waiting. “I knew about a short affair they had years ago. I learned just this week that it was still more or less going on.” It sounded damning, but Carter was sure Gawill had already said it, filled in the dates and the times Carter had visited him, and told him about the tapes. “I mean—I’ve hardly had time to see how I feel—felt about him, have I?”

“You didn’t attempt to see him, talk to him since Tuesday night? Gawill told me about Tuesday,” Ostreicher added.

“No.”

“Were you going to?”

Carter looked at him. “I hadn’t really finished talking with my wife. Finding out her intentions,” Carter said.

“I’m sorry to ask you these intimate questions, but what kind of talk did you have late Tuesday night?” Ostreicher looked from one to the other of them.

Carter was suddenly aware of Timmy standing in the hall doorway in his pajamas, and he stood up. “Timmy, you’d better go back to bed.” Carter walked toward him. “Come on. We’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

“Do they know who killed David?” Timmy asked.

“We don’t know anything yet. See you later, chum.” He patted Timmy’s back and guided him, reluctantly, to his room and closed the door.

“What was the result of your conversation, Mr. Carter?” Ostreicher asked as Carter came back.

“That—my wife admitted the affair was still going on,” Carter said. “More or less.” He glanced at Hazel.

“And did you ask her to stop it?”

“Not exactly.”

“He asked me what I intended to do about it,” Hazel said, “and I told him I didn’t know—which was true.”

“You were in love with Mr. Sullivan, Mrs. Carter?” Ostreicher asked.

“I suppose so. Yes,” she said very softly.

“And you told your husband that?”

“More or less,” Hazel said.

“Had you any intention of dissolving your marriage?”

Hazel shook her head. “We have a child, you know.”

“Yes, I know— In that case, the situation this week was in a very unresolved state.”

“I suppose so.”

Ostreicher looked at Carter expectantly.

“Yes,” Carter said.

Ostreicher turned a page in his tablet, turned a few more, looking at his writing. Then he said briskly, “Mr. Carter, we’ll have to ask you for fingerprints.”

The officer in uniform was producing the proper materials from his briefcase.

Carter supposed this meant they had found fingerprints in Sullivan’s apartment that were good enough to be compared with something.

“You had an injury to your thumbs when you were in prison, Gawill said,” Ostreicher remarked as he was pressing Carter’s fingertips down.

“Yes.” His thumbs had hurt a lot since 6 o’clock, and Carter had taken a couple of Pananods before dinner. He dreaded Ost-reicher’s pressure.

“I’ll let you do the thumbs—if you can give them a firm roll,” Ostreicher said.

Carter did, very firmly, so he would not have to do it a second time.

“We have a print from Mr. Sullivan’s apartment, but unfortunately it’s not very good. It’s from the marble foot that we think killed him, and the marble has a rough surface—at least where the print is. The doorknobs were too smeared to be of any help. The print we got is a middle finger—this one,” he said, pointing to the print next to the index on Carter’s sheet of paper.

Carter said nothing. He knew he had struck Sullivan on the side of the neck—the first blow. Evidently no bruise had been visible, or it had been overlooked.

Ostreicher went back to Gawill. How long had Carter known him? What did he think of him? Did he think he might have been implicated in the fraud that got Carter into prison? Why had Carter gone to see Gawill on his own initiative Tuesday evening?

Carter explained that Gawill had been making accusations against his wife with regard to Sullivan, and that Carter had wanted to find out if Gawill had any proof.

“And had he?”

“Oh-h—some,” Carter said. “Not as much as he boasted of having. You probably gathered he’s a bit cracked.”

“Cracked how?”

“Paranoid. He hated Sullivan, magnified what Sullivan was doing against him—just as he tried to magnify the affair between Sullivan and my wife.” Carter felt a funny emotional rise as he said the words, and warned himself to be on his guard. How could an affair be magnified? It was either going on or it wasn’t going on. “My point is—Gawill was trying to whip me up to kill Sullivan. He was so transparent about it, he was funny. I said to him Tuesday night, ‘I’m not going to bother, You’ll beat me to it, because you hate him much more than I do.’”

Ostreicher listened attentively, so attentively he was forgetting to write, but the officer was writing. “You’re not going to bother, you said.”

“Something like that. I’m sure Gawill didn’t tell you that, did he? He wants to pin this on me, I’m sure.”

“Yes, he certainly does. Well, so do you want to pin it on him.” Ostreicher smiled very slightly.

Carter looked at Hazel. Her face was tense, but her head still rested against the chair back.

“Did you ever tell Gawill you—” Ostreicher started again. “According to Gawill, you threatened to kill Mr. Sullivan. You said Tuesday night that you were going to do it.”

“Well, that’s not true.” Carter took a breath. “I’m quite sure Gawill told you that. Quite sure he wants you to believe it.” Carter looked at Hazel. “Ask my wife—if I seemed that angry Tuesday night or if I made threats against him.” Carter got up and started for the kitchen. “Excuse me, I’m going to get a glass of water. Would anyone else like one?”

Nobody wanted any.

“My husband certainly made no threats,” Hazel said.

Carter heard her voice distinctly. When he came back into the room, Ostreicher said:

“Were you ever in prison before this trouble down south?”

“No,” Carter said.

“And you served six years, according to Gawill.”

“Gawill has that right,” Carter said. “Six years.”

Ostreicher glanced at the officer, who looked up. “We’ll see what the fingerprints can show us.”

The young officer nodded and said, “Yes, sir.”

They both stood up, Ostreicher smiled. “Good-bye, Mr. Carter.” He turned to Hazel. “Good night, Mrs. Carter.”

Hazel got up. “You’ll call us tomorrow? Or can we call you?”

Ostreicher nodded. “We’ll call you tomorrow, I’m sure.”

“You’ll check on Gawill’s friends?” Hazel asked.

“Oh, all of them, never fear. Gawill’s got a pretty airtight alibi for tonight.”

“Yes, I was sure he would have,” Hazel said. “I didn’t bother asking about that.”

“Drinks and dinner with a couple of friends from six o’clock till ten. I spoke to them both by telephone tonight and also with the restaurant owner, but of course we’ll talk to them all personally.”

“I don’t think Gawill did it,” Hazel said with a bitter little smile, “but he has an awful lot of shady friends.”

“Yes, I’m getting the idea,” Ostreicher replied. He waved a hand, and he and the young officer went to the door.

Carter let them out.

Hazel paused on her way to the bedroom and glanced at Carter. “With the fingerprint—we might know by tomorrow, don’t you think?”

Carter nodded. “If it’s good enough.”

Carter emptied the ashtray, and washed his water glass and put it away. Everything depended on whether Gawill’s hired killer had spoken to Gawill this evening, Carter thought. But Gawill had probably told him not to telephone. Everything depended really, as usual, on money: if Gawill’s killer had not collected, he might tell Gawill he had killed Sullivan when the news came out in the papers tomorrow. But if he had been paid in advance, he might say, “I didn’t do it, but I saw Carter coming up the stairs.” The in-between was more likely: Gawill’s killer would collect his money for the killing (maybe five thousand dollars, maybe ten?) and then, if the police got on his trail and came to him, would come out with the real story: he hadn’t done the killing, but he had seen Carter entering the apartment. Carter reckoned that he had either borrowed time—or a slim chance of absolution.

23

“How stupid of us not to have asked the police what number we could call,” Hazel said fretfully at the breakfast table.

There wasn’t any jam on the table, and Carter didn’t get up to fetch it. Both of them left part of their scrambled eggs. Only Timmy slowly and solemnly plowed through his usual breakfast of Sugar Puffs, eggs, toast, and milk flavored with a dash of coffee. He had questioned them at length as soon as he woke up, and the answers had not satisfied him.

There was the usual Saturday shopping to do. Carter volunteered to do it, because Hazel obviously wanted to be near the telephone. She wouldn’t rest, Carter thought, until she had found out who killed Sullivan, and until the murderer was properly punished—put behind bars or executed. What had he possibly thought he could achieve by killing Sullivan? He simply hadn’t thought, of course. Carter started making up the shopping list on his own. No use asking Hazel what she wanted for the weekend. Hazel went into the living room to call the Laffertys. She had their number in her address book. While she was talking to them, Carter did the dishes. She talked a long while, and only finished as Carter was going out of the door with the wire shopping wagon.

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?”