Pale Betrayer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

it?”
    Steinberg joined them and tried his best to describe the kind of research Bradley and his group were engaged in. He was a heavy-built man who, Marks thought, like his work was a reservoir of latent energy. He wore thick-lensed glasses and probably wore them so much of the time that only his wife would immediately recognize him without them. He would be Marks’s last candidate for a man likely to be involved in physical violence. Steinberg forgot everything else, talking of physics, even for a moment the death of the man with whom he had shared the enthusiasm. Marks, his attention divided, was unable to grasp the concept Steinberg had just said was so simple. He glanced at Pererro’s suspended notes and was surprised at the three dots and an exclamation point representing Steinberg’s testimony. He had learned something about Pererro if not about elementary particles. Finally Steinberg said:
    “I’ll loan you a book if you come round to the laboratory.”
    “Thank you,” Marks said gravely. “I’d be interested. I want to ask you now about what happened at the laboratory tonight.”
    “Not a damned thing. We got there—myself and three of the graduate students working with us: we signed in at nine twenty, took about ten minutes setting up and then just stood around waiting.”
    “What time did Miss Russo arrive?”
    “Twenty to ten maybe. It’s in the check-in book. When Bradley didn’t show by ten thirty, I went out and called Janet.”
    Marks probed him on the business of Anne Russo’s glasses. Steinberg’s recollection of it was essentially the same as Anne had told.
    “Does she wear her glasses regularly?”
    “For work, yes. That’s why she forgets them so much.” It seemed a non sequitur to Marks but it satisfied him that there was not anything too unusual in the girl’s having to stop for them that night.
    “What’s the connection?” Steinberg asked.
    He had not been told, Marks realized, where Bradley was found. “Dr. Bradley was assaulted in the vestibule or just outside Miss Russo’s building.”
    Steinberg’s eyes blinked rapidly behind the glasses. “How did he get there ?”
    “That is our most difficult question at the moment. How or why.”
    Steinberg shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he go there?”
    “You can think of no reason?” Marks persisted, conscious of melodramatic overtones that made him sound like Fitzgerald.
    Steinberg suddenly caught on. “Annie? She’s one of the boys!”
    Marks was reminded of one of his mother’s favorite sayings: “The wisest men make the best fools.”
    It was Louise Steinberg who gave him the personality sketches he wanted of those present at the dinner party. Louise was the kind of woman Marks felt easy with: they had grown up in similar backgrounds, their parents early refugees from Hitler’s Europe. They did not speak of this, but both supposed it of the other. Louise, the mother of three children, was getting plump, the tendency, Marks mused, in many a Jewish girl once she had snared or been snared by the man she wanted. He was extremely grateful to meet her at this stage of his investigation.
    Louise had gone directly home from the Bradleys’, taking a cab part of the way: she had calculated the distance she could walk, where by taking a cab then, she could arrive home in time to avoid paying the baby-sitter another hour’s wage.
    “Besides,” she said, “my feet were hurting.”
    “I understand it was the original plan for you to have the dinner party at your house.”
    “I guess it was,” Louise said. It all seemed a very long time ago. Then she remembered and amended: “Actually it was Eric Mather’s idea. He called me this morning—yesterday now, isn’t it? Anyway, he said he’d like to throw a little party for Peter the day he got home. I told him he’d better get to it. Peter was on his way. Then, typically Eric, he began fussing—all the things he had to do that day. I shouldn’t say this,