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

especially since I wound up doing the same thing in a way, letting Janet do the work.”
    Marks offered her a cigarette. “About Eric,” he said easily, “What’s ‘typically Eric’?”
    Louise shrugged. “He’s a kook in lots of ways—I’ve audited some of his classes. Way out. But he’s very charming and good company unless he’s in a mood. Anyway, he’s a bachelor, and it generally winds up that somebody else gives his party for him.”
    “But tonight’s party was his idea?”
    “Yes, but everybody was glad Janet and I’d taken over. When Eric does give a party, you don’t get anything to eat until ten or eleven, and our boys don’t live that way. You know, come six o’clock …”
    Marks grinned. “If Mather had given the party, would the same people have been invited?”
    “The Bradleys and us anyway, and Anne maybe.”
    “He likes Anne?”
    “I wouldn’t say that, but … I don’t really know what I’d say, Lieutenant, so maybe I’d better not say anything.”
    “Please do,” the detective said. “If there isn’t any connection with what happened to Bradley, I won’t see any of these people again. And if there is a connection, it might be important.”
    Louise nodded and brushed a swatch of hair from her forehead. “I want to help, but I have a bad habit of adding two and two up to five.”
    Marks chanced a direct question: “Would you say there was any private relationship between Anne Russo and Dr. Bradley?”
    “Absolutely not. Outside of science they’d have had about as much attraction for one another as two neutrons. I think that’s right.”
    Marks leaned forward, lowering his voice: “Mrs. Bradley and Eric Mather?”
    Louise shook her head as though determined to convince herself as well. “No!”
    Marks waited.
    “He might have been helping her with her book,” Louise supplemented. “Janet’s a photographer, but really a photographer.”
    “I know,” Marks agreed.
    “They were going over the book last night while the rest of us were yakking.”
    Marks got the party picture at once: the scientists apart, Mather and Janet Bradley in a huddle. Louise, who would never be an outsider at any party, drifting to where the talk most interested her. “Who was the first to leave?” he asked.
    “Eric.”
    Curious, Marks thought, if there was anything between him and Mrs. Bradley.
    “But we were all ready to go by then. The boys were itching to look at their goddamn film. I asked Janet if she wanted to go to a movie. I guess in the last five years Janet and I have seen more movies than any two people in New York.”
    “Why didn’t you share a cab with Mather? You live in the same direction, don’t you?”
    “He didn’t ask me,” Louise said. “Besides, he wouldn’t have been going home. I don’t think he ever does these days if he can help it.”
    “Do you like him?” Marks asked. He felt as though he had known Louise for a long time and hoped she felt the same about him.
    She shrugged, something a little pitying in the gesture. “Sort of, I guess. I’m a real Yiddishe mama.”

five
    N OTHING MATHER HAD DONE that night, no part of his wanderings, his encounters with the wits of the Village, his sudden plunges into and withdrawals from barroom arguments and coffeehouse debates, not even his exultant sobriety in the post-midnight hours when poets fumbled for the lines they had bled into being and accepted his extemporaneous suggestions as the same—flattering whom?—nothing had assuaged his restlessness. Often he had fought down the temptation to call the Bradley house on some pretext—had he left his cigarette lighter? Peter’s temper would have cooled by bedtime. The fools! he would say. The bloody idiots. Mather was sure he would not have gone to the police: it would take too much of his precious time. It would take a little of it to explain to the police in the morning how the lettercase came to be in a public mailbox.
    Mather turned into Perry Street