Pale Betrayer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Read Free Book Online

dinner. Anne and the boys were washing up. They always do, and I was putting away. Peter asked me if I minded his going to the lab for an hour. He wasn’t in the habit of consulting me but he’d been away.” Again she qualified, as though anxious that Marks not think there were tensions between them: “By that I mean that long ago in our marriage, I’d come to know his way of pursuing an idea from the moment it occurred to him until he could use it—or throw it away.”
    “Anyone who knew him well would know that, wouldn’t they?” Janet nodded and Marks went on: “You must help me work out a timetable, and tell me any suggestion you might have on the route he would ordinarily have taken. I understand he was accustomed to walking to the University?”
    “Always, no matter what the weather. After Bob Steinberg called tonight, I remember thinking that Peter might have stopped at St. John’s Church. He often did. Not to pray. It was just that sometimes he liked a Gothic darkness. And Athens is a very bright city. I don’t even know what he saw of it …” She almost broke then. “He wanted me to go with him.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “It seemed like a great deal of money to spend for so little time, not even a week. And I needed to be here—or thought so then … a book that seemed important.”
    “ Child of the City ?”
    Janet nodded.
    “Do you have any children, Mrs. Bradley?”
    “We had a son. He died.”
    “I’m sorry I asked.”
    Janet shrugged and then covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God. Will nothing make this real? Or would that be too much to bear?”
    Marks glanced at Pererro. Notebook in hand, and pencil suspended, he looked like an automaton. The clock rasped, and as Marks started to speak again, it struck twelve.
    “Who, besides those present, would have known that Dr. Bradley was leaving the house at nine fifteen tonight?”
    “I shouldn’t think anyone else,” Janet said.
    “No one would have had to open the laboratory building?”
    “Most all of the group had keys.”
    “After the others left—Miss Russo was stopping home,” Marks said. “Did your husband mention stopping to pick her up?”
    “No. He said simply that I should wait up because he wasn’t going to stay very long.”
    Marks asked then about Bradley’s activity from the time he got home until the guests arrived. His only phone call had been to Professor Bauer, chairman of the Physics Department.
    A few minutes later the doorbell rang and Anne poked her head out the kitchen doorway. “Shall I go? It’s probably the Steinbergs.”
    Janet moaned and turned away. “If only I could be alone … Where did they take Peter?”
    “We’ll let you know,” Marks said. “There must be an autopsy.” Anne had gone into the hallway. “Mrs. Bradley, there had to be some circumstance under which your husband would have gone to Anne Russo’s apartment.”
    “Only if he were told that Anne was ill—or hurt. I can think of no other reason.”
    “You are absolutely certain?”
    “I am. Peter had a very strong sense of propriety.”
    “That’s all for now,” Marks said, getting up. “I want to talk with the Steinbergs—in your kitchen if you don’t mind?”
    But Janet had withdrawn mentally. She sat very straight and looked almost prim and childlike, her hands in her lap folded tightly into one another. Marks remembered her husband’s very young face—seemingly turned that way by death—which had no right to make its captives young—and the remark of the Negro cop who had found him: “He looks like a preacher to me, a good man.”
    Marks and Pererro waited in the kitchen while the Steinbergs spoke to Janet. Pererro looked into the darkroom, the door to which was open.
    “Jees,” he said, “what a way to do up a pantry.”
    Marks looked into the room. A gallon bottle of acetic acid stood on the shelf near the door, the poison label clearly visible. “Makes you kind of thirsty, doesn’t