6
He did not stop in the kitchen but continued on into the lighted living room, expecting to find his wife in her chair and wondering just what he was going to say to her. Then, even as he brought some discipline to his thoughts, he realized that the effort was wasted. The room was empty and the only light came from a floor lamp by the wing chair.
For a second or two as he stood there he felt a welcome sense of relief, but it did not last when he remembered the station wagon and its warm radiator. Because he knew she must be home he moved quietly to the inner hall. From there he could see the open door of their bedroom and the darkness beyond. Still moving soundlessly, he reached the doorway and peered inside. There was enough light behind him to reveal the elongated mound her body made under the covers and the dark hair spread upon the pillow.
The fact that she had gone to bed early was, in itself, not unusual. In the last couple of months there had been several times when she had retired soon after dinner and he understood the reason for this. On those occasions he would come into their darkened room and undress as quietly as he could. Sometimes she would be awake, or would waken, and he would slip into bed beside her and hold her until she fell asleep again. At other times, knowing that she was asleep and not wanting to disturb her, he would move down the hall to the guest bedroom. The fact that the light was already on here was her way of telling him that tonight she was inviting him to sleep alone, and he stood another moment, watching for some sign of movement and wondering whether she was asleep or whether she was afraid of the questions he might ask.
The thought brought with it a sense of frustration but it gave him little alternative and he went back to the kitchen and turned on the light. The dishes they had used for their soup and salad earlier had been rinsed and stacked on the counter and he now put them into the dishwasher. He thought about making a drink and knew he did not want one. But he wanted something and he compromised by getting a beer from the refrigerator. He took this into the living room, and when he had a cigarette going he eased into the chair, his somber gaze fixed but unseeing and his mouth set grimly as his mind began again to grapple with his problems.
He made no conscious effort to think; he simply could not help himself. He found himself wondering how long it would be before Sam Adler’s body was discovered. He wondered what course the police investigation would take, and as he recalled again the story of George Freeman’s fight with the stranger he found a new motive for Adler’s death. Freeman was the quiet type that no one seemed to know too well. That he was intensely jealous where Doris Lamar was concerned seemed obvious in the light of what had happened, but he realized now that there was no point in trying to imagine what Freeman might do under extreme provocation.
Once the investigation was under way, the police would be sure to learn about the relationship between Freeman and Doris Lamar and Sam Adler. But—and this thought jarred him—they might also learn from Doris that Adler had been asking questions about him. Suppose they came here to ask other questions. Suppose someone had seen Marion tonight when she was out in the station wagon. Suppose...
This line of reasoning angered him and he swore aloud. Such disloyalty shamed him and he told himself again that Marion could not have killed Adler; she could not kill anyone. She was a completely normal, well-adjusted, and sensible girl. She always had been. The fact that her pregnancy had given her some moments of emotional turbulence could not possibly have brought her to the point of violence. This is what he told himself and this is what he believed, and yet some obscure segment of his brain that he could not control persisted in asserting itself.
He could not forget the knife that had been thrust into Sam Adler’s back. It was, he felt sure, a kitchen knife of some sort, and the obvious assumption was that it had come from the kitchenette in Adler’s room. But he could not dismiss the thought that Adler had been stabbed in the back. It was hard for him to understand why a man would use this method unless the killing was premeditated. But to a woman a kitchen knife was a familiar object. Driven by fear or desperation or a moment of temporary insanity, a woman wanting to strike back and finding such a knife handy might use it.
He lost track of time as he sat there brooding, his beer forgotten and growing flat in the glass. In an effort to curb his imagination and to submerge his present doubts and fears, he forced his mind back into the past while he considered the girl he had married, not just as he knew her since they had been together, but before that, before Ted Corbin.
She had been brought up in Westchester in a family that was socially acceptable and soundly rooted. As Marion Haskell there was enough money for a good finishing school and a college education, even though the Haskells had never been wealthy. Her father worked in Wall Street and his speculations were not always too wise, so that when a heart attack took him a month or so before Marion was to graduate from Vassar, there was not a great deal left except the house, two small insurance policies payable to her and her brother, and a large one that went to her mother, who, for the past few years, had been living with her son in Texas.
Marion had gone to work for an advertising agency in New York immediately after graduation. She had been sharing an apartment with another girl when she met Ted Corbin, who was a friend of a friend of her roommate’s. Corbin was working as a paper salesman at the time, and the factors that caused the marriage to founder after three years were the very ones that attracted Marion to him in the first place.
That Corbin was a big, good-looking, and easygoing man was at once in his favor, but what intrigued her most was the fact that he was so different from the young men she had gone out with in the past. Mostly these were Ivy League youths whose standards, conduct, and ambitions were so similar to her own. The pattern was familiar to her and she enjoyed being with them; the affairs that she had with one or another from time to time were in a minor key, but always the language they shared was the same.
Since Ted Corbin had not been trained to fit the pattern, he presented an approach that Marion found both different and exciting. For Corbin had been born and brought up in a small Pennsylvania mining town, and if his intelligence quotient was perhaps less than some, he had other skills, one of which was the ability to play a hard and aggressive type of football that was much in demand. This got him into a school in South Carolina, and by the time he had graduated he had gained some prominence in his field. He had lasted two years in the professional league, and when he realized he would never be a first-string regular, he had taken a job with a southern paper company, which eventually brought him to New York.
The fact that he was not adept or skilled in social intercourse did not seem important to Marion, even though she was aware of this. She liked his breeziness, his easy manners, his offhand ways; it was only much later that she discovered these ways were a little crude, a little too coarse for her taste. For he was, basically, an outdoor man. He liked to hunt and fish and go to the fights or the ball game. He had not read a book since he left college and she discovered that he had no intention of ever reading another. His taste in newspapers was limited to the tabloids or the sporting pages. His friends were not her friends, and even though he tried at times, the lack of communication eventually made him sullen and distant.
Friction developed early in the marriage but they tried in their own ways to combat it. But it was harder for Corbin because there was little depth to his thinking and he did not have the basic equipment to adjust to new things. Discouraged by his failure to make the marriage go, he had sought comfort in earlier friends. He drank too much and had difficulty in holding a job. There had been three jobs in three years, and he was on his way to see about a fourth when tragedy struck the aircraft. Even before that, they both knew that their marriage was finished. They had practically agreed on a separation and Marion had started to look for another job in the advertising field....
The sound that cut through Hayden’s thoughts and made him jump in the chair so startled him that for the moment he did not know whether it came from the telephone or the front door. It took him another few seconds to break the spell of nervous tension that gripped him, to glance at his watch, to understand that he had been sitting here for nearly two hours. For it was now a few minutes after eleven, and as the sound was repeated and he came to his feet, he understood that whoever had rung the doorbell had not come here on a social call. He moved quickly then, the trepidation growing in him as his pulse quickened.
He did not know the two men who faced him as he opened the door, but he saw that one was tall and lean-looking in his trench coat, the other somewhat shorter and more heavily built. It was the tall one who made the introduction.
“Mr. Hayden?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Lieutenant Garvey of the State Police.... This is County Detective Ball from the State’s Attorney’s office.”
Hayden’s acknowledgment was a mumbled “Hello,” and although he had already considered the possibility of such a call, he was glad the light was at his back. For in those first moments he could feel his features stiffen as the blood drained from his face. He had the impression that the shadowed eyes beneath the hat brims were intent upon his reactions and he concentrated on making his voice sound reasonably surprised but not disconcerted.
“What can I do for you?”
“We’re sorry to bother you at this hour,” Garvey said, “but we need some information and we thought you might help us. May we come in?”
“Certainly.” Hayden stepped back and waved them toward the living room. “In there. Take off your coats.”
They removed their hats and unbuttoned their coats but did not take them off. They sat down on the divan and he could see now that Garvey was in his late thirties, a confident-looking man with a prominent jaw, deep-set gray eyes, and short brown hair. Ball was older and more round in the face. His head was nearly bald on top and Hayden was at once aware of the dark eyes which were steady, watchful, and inquisitive.
“I was just having a beer before I went to bed,” he said, and took a swallow of the stale brew to prove it. “Can I offer you anything?”
“No thanks,” they said.
“We’ll try not to keep you up,” Garvey said. “But we’d like to find out what you know about a man named Adler.”