Manhattan Noir 2 (15 page)

Yes, that must be it. He has nailed it to the ground. He lights another cigarette, looks around the room, paces to the window and looks at 72nd Street three floors below him, addicts milling in front of the hotel. He had been smart to have selected a location like this to be hidden although the circumstances were not of the best. If nothing else, living in this hotel for some weeks has made him socially conscious.

Perhaps it was not merely a crime of passion, though. His wife must have known that sooner or later Robinson would let slip news of the affair and the divorce would have been shattering. At all costs the woman believed in appearances. She would not even have a bedroom fight unless she was made up for it.

He sighs, walks away from the window. Relief overtakes him. It is good to know that he has the matter straightened out for himself at last and not a moment too soon. The police are closing in; even with the help of the inspector he could not remain in flight from the authorities forever. And to be apprehended in a hotel like this—

He picks up the phone to call the inspector and give him the explanation that will, at last, set him free. As he inhales deeply to brace himself, a fragment of dust in the foul hotel room penetrates his lungs in the wrong way and he coughs. He coughs repeatedly, wheezing, feeling the first stab of an asthma attack. Enough. Enough of cigarettes. In his new life he will definitely give up the habit. He stubs out his forty-third cigarette of the day and dials the inspector’s home number.

He thinks at last that he has got the thing clear in his mind. Not soon enough to have saved the agony of flight but not too late. Not by a damned sight too late. He lights a cigarette to celebrate this. When everything is over he will give up the habit but now he will indulge himself. The murderer was Robinson. Robinson! It all ties together. His business partner and his wife must have been having an affair for many years until his wife had lost interest and had told the man that she had reached the end, that the worn-out affair was not worth the risk of a lost marriage.

In a fit of jealous rage Robinson must have killed her in the offices, then planted the incriminating securities next to her and fled.

The securities had led the police inevitably to him and with his wife dead and Robinson out of the country he did not have a chance. It had been clever of Robinson to arrange that illness of his father in Italy, diabolically so, and no details had ever been checked. Did Robinson even have a father?

And so he had no choice but to become a fugitive while he tried to piece the crime together himself. He had to find the explanation that would free him of the authorities and restore him to the life that for so long he had taken for granted. But it had been difficult. Now the police had infiltrated into the hotel itself. The dope traffic in the halls and outside might distract them for a while; still it could be only a matter of time until they traced down his room number, poured into his door holding guns, and arrested him.

Fortunately, he had at last worked out the true explanation of the crime. He would be saved. If he could only reach the inspector quickly enough to start the process in motion—He coughs. The air in this old and vicious hotel, once elegant, now destroyed, located in an undesirable area of the city he has always hated even in the good years when he and his young wife lived here, this air has become increasingly foul and in the bargain, due to the terrible impact of the murder and then the building pressures on him he has been smoking too much, even beyond his normal excess.

He has always had a morbid fear of getting lung cancer and dying slowly, although his own doctor had assured him just two months ago, shortly before the nightmare began, that for a man of forty-seven he had been in perfect health. Slight elevation of the blood pressure; suspicious fullness around the area of the spleen, yes, but these were not serious problems and could be controlled. Lung cancer was contradicted under all circumstances.

He thinks now of his doctor, a thin, nervous internist who had also treated his wife, been taciturn about her own condition, had insisted on the sanctity of that relationship and of his files.

Funny that the doctor had never known anything about the man’s personal life, although he had been treating the two of them for seven years. No pictures on his desk that might be indicative, no wife or children squinting or smiling imbecilically at the degrees framed on the wall opposite.

Perhaps she was having an affair with the doctor then as well. This was not impossible. She was a passionate woman for whom he had had little time for many years. Pressures of business. Building the firm. Acquiring securities. There might have been quite a few.

Robinson’s problem, in fact, might not have been the end of the affair but the discovery that he was merely another in a procession. Robinson had vanity over his insecurity. This would have been unbearable to him. Looked at in that way the situation creates sympathy for Robinson as well. Tragic he thinks. All of it was tragic: missed circumstances, lapsed opportunities, an exercise in misdirection. No time to take the long view however or to want to go back. It is too late for this.

Procedures. Stick to the
modus operandi
as he has seen it established. First, the call to the inspector to clear himself. Then the meeting with the inspector to give the details, the abandonment of charges, the hunt for the true murderer, Robinson.

He thinks he knows how the man can be found. In Italy or New York Robinson’s habits are still as naked to him as only those of a lifelong business partner can be. It is not for nothing that they have worked together, shared his wife.

At last, soon or late, in the presence of the police or alone he will come face to face with the man, possibly in some dismal hotel room just like this one. Staggering against the walls, sweating, coughing, mumbling, choking, Robinson may look very much as he has over these weeks. He will feel sympathy for the man as only one who has shared these circumstances could.

“I forgive you,” he will say, reaching forward to touch Robinson. “I’m sorry, it was not merely your fault but mine too. I relieve you of your guilt. All right, it is all right,” and will connect then, a springing clasp, wrist to wrist and Robinson will disintegrate before him, weeping.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” he will say, “I had no choice. It was just that I was so frightened,” and will cast him a look so full of pleading and mercy that it will contain all the vengeance he ever needed. As for the rest of it, the arrest, arraignment, trial, incarceration, he will play no role. He will let the authorities do as they will for the urge for vengeance will be out of him. Will anyone understand this?

Passion and loss. That was what it was. He can surely make this clear to the inspector, who is himself an understanding man who in his business must have seen many interesting cases like this. He and the inspector someday will share those reminiscences in a cocktail lounge or at a good restaurant on the East Side. He and the inspector. His salvation and his friend.

He picks up the phone, knowing the number so well that he could, if a blind man, find it expertly. He dials the number.

Finally, as a suddenness, all of it falls into place for him. The doctor.
All of the time it would have had to have been the doctor.

Yes, yes! The man must have known his wife well. It had been seven years after all. He had treated her, understood from the confidences she would have given that she was lonely and abandoned, resentful of the way his original interest in her had fragmented into a hundred other meaningless concerns.

The doctor, hearing all of this on late afternoons in the gray of the empty office, must have taken all of these for signals instead of desperate secrets and tried to interest her in having an affair with him—when suddenly, stunningly, she turned on him in revulsion and then laughed at his desires. How well he knew this; she was exactly that kind of a woman.

“Where did you ever get that idea?” his wife must have said. “Just because I told you a few things did you think it meant that I would go to bed with you? I wouldn’t touch you, you foul little man. Hire a good-looking nurse and try it on her.”

“No,” the doctor would have said, “you can’t say this to me. You cannot. There must be some reason—”

“I’ll say anything I want,” his wife would have answered, “I’m paying the bills. You don’t even exist in my life if I don’t want you to. Where could you have gotten the idea I would touch you?” She had that streak; it would have been what she said. And the doctor, a simple man enthralled by his desires, would have been unable to deal with it.

So, he had killed her. After saying what she did, his wife must have turned to leave the office, but before she could even reach the door the doctor had, in a fit of passion, ended her life. With a scalpel or hypodermic injection or whatever else doctors kept in their examining rooms.

They weren’t regulated, that was the trouble. An M.D. could get away with anything, once you had that degree on the wall. But it did not guarantee that you could have sex with your patients.

That was the point at which he had gone wrong. It would have been a clean wound—he knew his business, after all—with very little bleeding and after that with crazed skill the doctor would have disposed of the weapon and erased all signs of his own implication in the crime.

Had she died immediately? Or had she hung on, gasping on the floor for a few moments, her eyes slowly gazing as she stared at the fluorescence? Well, no need to be too graphic, he will think of that some other time. He wants to think that it was a clean, quick death; even for her cruelty she should not have suffered.

The securities then. With the woman lying at last dead before him the doctor’s passion would have turned to panic and then at last to mad cunning as the thought came to him that without witnesses and with the fact of a sterile marriage there would be an available suspect.

If he could plant the securities near the body then the investigation would inevitably turn away from him, despite the fact that it was his office, and toward the husband with whose fate those securities were inextricably linked.

The doctor would not even have to worry about getting the corpse from the office; it would be credible that the husband would want to kill her in surroundings where someone else would be implicated.

Double reverse. Sitting in the hotel room he nods slowly, being able to appreciate, as he thinks the thing through, the doctor’s cunning all the way down the line.

So the doctor had done it then. There was plenty of information from the wife over seven years and he knew exactly where to look. He had seized the securities, placed them on top of the corpse and then closed up his office, knowing that all of this would shortly be found by the authorities who would make the connections.

The trap had sprung well. If he had not finally had the alertness and good sense to consider the issue of the doctor, the man without whom, damningly, the crime could not have worked, he would never have gotten out. But finally, through his own thought and effort, the crime has been solved.

If he can get the facts to the right people in time.

Robinson first. He must call Robinson and give him the explanation slowly, carefully, just the way he has worked it out.

His business partner is a ponderous man; he must take time to explain and not confuse him by hurrying. Still, he knows that he can be counted on: if it were not for Robinson smuggling him away from home at the critical moment and into this dismal but safe hotel room he would at this moment be in a cell, awaiting trial and conviction.

Still, he thinks, Robinson could have shown better taste in hotels; even at this level there must be a better place and the drug traffic is incessant.

But his partner and friend of almost a quarter-century, the only man he could ever trust, had stood by him as none of the others would, not even the inspector. Robinson insisted steadfastly that he was innocent, that he never could have done it. And had bought just enough time from the inspector to put him, for the moment, out of their grasp.

But only for the moment. He must remember that. Like his poor wife, he had run out of time.