The Long Night (15 page)

And that brought me to six-thirty and a doorway on Fifth Avenue—the same doorway I'd sheltered in the night a hit-and-run car had kissed Pauline Gordon good-bye.

It was still raining: a fine drizzle that clothed umbrellas and topcoats with a fuzz like they'd been sprinkled with diamond dust. The night was raw and the damp made old scars ache with old memories. I hoped Carole hadn't arranged to work late. Or to do anything else late.

She hadn't. At six-thirty the light above Kovak's all-glass door went off. At six-thirty-one Carole Van Buren came out. Almost on her heels came a plump guy in a check coat and a smart fedora and a white silk scarf fastened at the throat and fluffed out to cover his shirt front. He carried himself like he was a trifle overweight.

When he'd locked up, they remained in the darkened entrance. I could see them carrying on a sporadic conversation. He talked and she nodded at intervals. For all I knew maybe she said yes and no as well.

They'd been waiting a couple of minutes when a sleek car rolled into the kerb and a guy in a dustcoat got out. It was a nice job was that customs-built car. I'm a simple guy; I always think a
-litre Rolls-Bentley is a nice thing to ride in. If you can afford to spend all of twelve grand.

The guy in the dustcoat gave Kovak the keys and helped Miss Van Buren into the car and closed the door after her and went round to the offside to speak with Kovak. While they were talking, I flagged a cab and told the jockey what I wanted him to do.

We set off soon afterwards through the rain and we kept an unvarying fifty yards in the rear like we were on the end of a tow-rope. Wherever Kovak went, we went. And he didn't act like he had any idea he was being tailed. On a wet, dark night, a cab riding behind you is just another cab.

It was a nice leisurely trip. Kovak drove the way a guy does when he wants to spin out the journey as long as he can. Running time from Fifth Avenue to the Village should've been only half what he took. With a dame like Carole Van Buren beside me, I wouldn't have been in any hurry, either,
to get her home. Unless she was going to invite me in for a Scotch and sofa.

But Carole evidently didn't want to play. Not that night, anyway. When the Rolls-Bentley slid to a stop outside the brownstone apartment house in Brooke Street, she got out and shut the door smartly like she'd either told Kovak good night already or she didn't intend to. Then she made a brisk heel-and-toe across the sidewalk. By the time he climbed from behind the wheel, she was half-way up the steps leading to the street door.

As my cab rolled past, I saw him catch up with her and take hold of her arm. The jockey saw it, too. He said, “'When a dame's got what she's got, you can't blame a guy for trying . . . can you?“

I told him to pull up and I paid him off. When he drove away, I stopped where I was and watched the boy-and-girl routine a hundred yards back.

An illuminated white-glass ball shone down on the head of the steps and floodlit Mr. Kovak and Miss Van Buren in an act that was old when Adam was in short fig-leaves. She said no and he said please. She said it was all wrong and he asked why. She said he shouldn't need to be told why and would he be a good boy and go home to his neglected wife?

I was too far away to hear the lines but I could guess. And after two or three minutes, I didn't need to guess she'd run out of excuses for keeping him on the right side of her apartment door. Because she began to get mad with him.

And he made a mistake; he tried to catch hold of the arm she'd just freed.

What she said must've been good. He let go of her and backed down the steps as if she'd thrown a first-class scare into him. With the light shining full in his face, he went backwards across the sidewalk until he bumped into the door of the car. I heard him call up to her,
“
You wouldn't . . . would you?”

And she said something that could've been “. . . No, of course not . . . but behave yourself . . . you know it's silly. . . .”

Kovak didn't even tell her good night. He got into the big sleek car like a bunny bolting to earth and he gunned the
motor in a racing take-off that removed a month's tread from his rear tyres.

Carole Van Buren stood at the top of the flight of steps staring after him long after the twin tail lights had turned the corner. She was swinging her handbag by the strap and she acted like she was deep in thought. Then, very slowly, she opened the street door and went inside.

I had plenty to think about, too. The crazy hunch I'd been nursing might've been just plain crazy. King Gilmore could've had any one of a dozen reasons for wishing me out of his way for three weeks; the time period could've been just coincidence. And Pauline Gordon might not have been putting the squeeze on him but on someone else. . . .

Someone else could have driven the killer car outside Kovak's premises on Fifth Avenue—someone who was not connected with King Gilmore. Kovak had left that night around five o'clock. So Pauline had said. But she hadn't said he might not have returned . . . and waited . . . if he were the boy-friend Judith was supposed to have had. Yet . . . Pauline had volunteered the information “. . .
Kovak doesn't know who killed Judith Walker.
. . .” And, only a moment or two before she'd been flung like a heap of rags on the sidewalk, she'd used almost the same words about Carole Van Buren.

But she could've been wrong . . . or lying. A tramp like Pauline Gordon would lie Malenkov into the U.S. Senate if it paid off a dividend. Supposing she had lied. . . .

Supposing Ivor (Hotpants) Kovak had been playing around with Judith . . . and she'd begun to ask for more than four hundred a month . . . or she'd sing a song to Mrs. (Notsohot) Kovak . . . who maybe owned a very big slice of the Fifth Avenue business . . . and could toss Mister out on his ear. . . . That was a thought.

And supposing Carole knew that her boss and Judith had been like that . . . did she believe he'd shut Judith's mouth for keeps? Was that what she'd threatened him with? Or just that she'd spill the beans to his wife if he stepped out of line?

None of which even tried to explain why I'd been framed for Judith's killing. Nothing explained that—or almost nothing. But there was time for explanations, plenty of time
. . . so long as King Gilmore didn't discover I was back in town.

One thing I could learn and that was why Kovak had had such a shock when I asked him where he'd been the night Judith Walker died. And why he'd refused to see me. And why the beautiful Miss Van Buren hadn't wanted him to answer any of my questions.

Whatever he knew, my idea was that she knew, too. And maybe she'd tell me . . . if I used the right approach. The only way to find out was to ask.

I went along the street to the brownstone house with the lighted ball above the steps. As I went into the lobby, I could hear her sharp heels going upstairs. I went upstairs, too.

IT WAS an old house with high ceilings and big solid doors and an air of times gone by. The lighting fixture in the ground floor hall hung from the centre of an ornamental circle of raised plaster. Nymphs and cherubs grinned vacantly down from the cornice. Polished linoleum flanked the narrow carpet and the stair treads were edged with strips of worn brass. Except for the installation of electric light, I guessed the place hadn't changed much in the past fifty years.

The carpet hadn't any underfelt and Carole's heels made a string of small thumping sounds travelling away from me on the floor above. By the time I was half-way up, the rhythmic bump-bump-bump-bump-bump came to a stop. I heard the clasp of a handbag snap shut . . . the clink of keys . . . the rattle of a key entering a lock . . . and then nothing.

All around me, there was no sound. The old house was suddenly very quiet like I was alone . . . as though nobody lived in it any more . . . as though nobody had ever lived in it. Somewhere above me, Carole Van Buren had been swallowed up by the silence that only the sound of her heels had broken . . . like a new version of the Indian Rope Trick.

My shoes sounded loud on the brass stair-treads. I felt as if I were bearing with me some of the noise of the outside world and losing a portion of it with every step I took. Behind me the quiet closed in as I went on up.

In the light of a low-power lamp on the first floor the wrought-iron handrail cast stripes of light and shade across the wall beside me. It was the only lamp that was burning. When I reached the top I saw that somebody had forgotten to switch on the other one farther along the hallway.

Carole could've switched it on if she'd wanted; the switch was on the wall alongside her door. But she evidently had enough light to see who had followed her upstairs.

She was standing quite still with her back to the door. Her face was a pale blur against the dark woodwork. She didn't move at all as I walked towards her.

When I was only a dozen paces off, she said, “Oh . . . I thought——” She sounded no more than faintly surprised.

I said, “You thought Ivor Kovak had come back to try again . . . after he'd got over his scare. Disappointed?”

She put the back of her hand to her red mouth while she studied me carefully. Then she said, “So you were outside listening. . . .” With no inflection in her voice, she added, “I remember your name now; it's Bowman. Apparently you believe in trying again, too. What is it you want?”

“To take up where we left off the other day,” I said. “Without any patrolmen interrupting this time.”

“You're wasting your smart talk on me. I've——” she felt for the doorknob and shook her head “—nothing more to say. I've already told you all I know about Judith Walker.”

“All you know?” I asked. “What about her regular fella—that guy who looked much the same as any other guy in a tuxedo? The guy Judith ditched when he was sent to the pen?”

Swift fear came into her eyes. She wet her lips before she said, “Who told you about Clive? He didn't have anything to do with—what happened.”

I said, “Funny you should say didn't instead of couldn't. Makes me think maybe brother Clive was back in circulation before . . . oh, so that's it. Where is he now?”

She shrugged. When she'd thought of a couple of alternative answers, discarded them both, and returned to the first
one she'd been going to give me, she said, “I don't know. I haven't seen him since he was released.”

“If he's on parole, the police will know how to lay their hands on him.”

“They've no reason to want him. He hasn't done anything wrong.”

“Wouldn't you say murder was wrong? Everybody else does.”

Her face went pale and the fear in her eyes was now too great to hide. In an unsteady voice, she said, “Clive wouldn't do a thing like that. He was in love with Judith. He always hoped she would go back to him when he came out.”

“But two years is a long time. How do you think he felt when he found out she'd got herself another guy?”

“He'd have been prepared for it. I've tried to tell him what she was more than once.”

“Which means you didn't altogether fancy Judith as a sister-in-law,” I said. “But last time we met, you told me you and she were friends of a sort. Was it the sort that fills a guy's mind with poison until he becomes a killer through jealousy?”

Carole's mouth opened like I'd prodded her where no gentleman should. She looked like she was sorry she hadn't a knife to prod me with. When she'd got her breath back, she said tightly, “You've no right to say that. I didn't tell him anything he wouldn't have found out in time for himself. And he wasn't jealous, anyway. He still wanted her if she'd have him.”

“And that made you very happy . . . didn't it? One of these days, the law might get round to asking you how much you might've wanted to see Judith Walker dead. What will you say then?”

She stared at me blankly as though the thought had taken her completely by surprise. She wasn't angry. She wasn't afraid now, either. Her fear had all been for her brother. After a long moment, she said, “ You don't really believe I killed her to protect Clive. I know you don't.”

“Who said you did it to protect Clive? Who said you did it at all? But you might know the name of the party who wanted her out of the way even more than you did.”

“That's crazy! How would I . . . oh, I see.” She took a deep breath and shivered. “And now we're back to Ivor Kovak again,” she said. “All this talk was just to soften me up . . . wasn't it? You must be getting well paid. . . .”

“No one's paying me to find out who killed her,” I said. “I'm doing this for free. And I intend to go doing it until I get me a tenant for the armchair up at the Tombs . . . whoever it turns out to be.”

“It won't be Kovak,” Carole said flatly. “He didn't do it. Even if I'm sure of nothing else, I'm sure of that.”