Shadow of Guilt by Patrick Quentin Read Free Book Online

have thought of that before and arranged a signal ring so she could be sure it was me. Then I remembered how one summer afternoon at the Cape years before, when Ala was a kid, I’d taught her to tap out her name in Morse. I spelled out A—L—A on the buzzer. Once and then again. There was a silence that seemed interminable, then the front door clicked. I opened it into the hall.
    The little cage elevator was there on the ground floor. I took it up.
    On the narrow landing of the fourth floor there were three doors. From one of the doors at the rear of the building came the sound of a radio playing some sort of Spanish dance music. It was the first time in my life that a radio—implying people—had ever seemed threatening. I tiptoed to Saxby’s door. I tapped softly. The door opened inward. I slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind me.
    Ala was there, standing immediately in front of me. She was wearing a coat. Her face, framed in the fair, Hadley hair, was shockingly different, stripped of all its pretty, indulged young girl’s assurance. It was hollow under the cheekbones, waxy, like a dummy’s face in a department store window.
    “Where is he?” I said.
    “He’s dead,” she said. “Somebody’s killed him. He’s dead.”
    It was a seedy, bachelor’s room with haphazard bits of furniture and its walls painted mustard. I saw Don Saxby right away. He was sprawled on the gray cotton rug just under the mantelpiece. He was wearing a white shirt and dark gray slacks. He lay on his back. One arm was flung up over his head, its clenched fingers resting against the base of a plant stand from which a sickly yellowish philodendron trailed down. I crossed and looked at him. The eyes, beneath the thick black lashes, were open. He looked horribly himself. There was even a vestige of the easy, affectionate smile frozen on his lips. In his neck was a wound, ragged and bloody. Another wound, staining the white shirt scarlet, was in the left side of his chest.
    Two wounds. That’s what I thought first as I stared at the open eyes, the small, amused smile. One shot tearing into the neck; a second shot in the heart. I’d known it was murder, of course. Even before Ala had said so, I’d never from the first second had any doubt about that. But there it was remorselessly stated for me by the fact of the two wounds.
    I forced my eyes to move away from the body. I saw the gun. It lay on the carpet just under the frilly skirt of an old overstuffed chair with a sagging seat, gleaming theatrically like an object emphasized by the cameras in a TV melodrama.
    I turned back to Ala. She hadn’t moved from the door. She was holding her hands tightly locked together over the middle button of her coat. That was the first time I noticed that she was wearing gloves—thick black knitted Norwegian gloves with a white figure, gloves I’d given her last year for Christmas.
    Looking at her was terrible to me because it brought with it the realization of how totally ignorant we are of other people—even people we love. There was nothing from the long years of our living together to tell me: She’s innocent. No instinct to prompt: She’s your niece, your child; of course it’s inconceivable she could have killed a man. I stood watching her, remembering her fits of sudden rage as a child, thinking of what could have happened to her infatuation for Don Saxby once she had accepted the fact that she’d been to him only a commodity, a girl with money in the family, nothing more than that.
    “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
    Her tongue came out to moisten her lips. It was a nervous trick I’d never noticed in her before. It heightened the atmosphere of unreality.
    “I…” she said. “I… There’s nothing to tell. I just came.”
    “Why?”
    “To see him, to find out… Connie’d said those things, all those disgusting things about Toronto. She swore they were true, that she could prove it. I wouldn’t believe her. I had to