The Follower (2 page)

As the hot jets of water rained down on his straw-colored hair, mirrors reflected his big, muscular body from all angles. In Venezuela he had lived in shorts, and the contrast between the mahogany of his torso and legs and the pallor of his lean hips was almost grotesque.

Where the hell was Ellie? Out, of course, with some of her crazy friends, who were still known to him only vaguely as first names. But where? For no apparent reason he thought of Corey Lathrop. He had won Ellie from Corey; he ought to be able to be indifferent to him. But Corey had everything he had never had himself — inherited wealth and position established on a solid foundation of the right family and the right education. Obscurely, although he wouldn’t admit it, Corey made him feel inferior. The rasping idea came: ‘What if she’s out with Corey Lathrop?’

He dried himself, walked out into the bedroom and pulled from the closet his shabby old grey-flannel bathrobe. He had been embarrassed by it on his wedding night and wished he had thought to buy a new one. But Ellie had adored it.

‘Darling, it positively reeks of gyms and Y.M.C.A. shower-rooms. Why didn’t I think of marrying a boxer years ago?’

Twisting the cord around his waist, he returned to the living-room and started up the curved staircase which led to the bar. Of course Ellie wasn’t with Corey. Corey bored her. She had said it a dozen times.

‘He sits on Parole Boards and redeems convicts in his spare time. What can you possibly do with a man whose idea of mad gaiety is to redeem convicts?’

The living-room was two floors high and the bar made a little balcony at the head of the stairs, railed off with a white iron balustrade on which philodendrons and other vines trailed from white pots in tropical exuberance. Mark reached the head of the stairs. The light from the living-room was only a shadowy radiance here. He paused, tried to remember where the electric switch was, remembered and snapped it on.

He saw the familiar lavender and grey walls, the low divans, the horse-shoe bar of bleached oak.

He came to an abrupt halt.

Sprawled on his back at the foot of a bar stool, bizarrely spruce in a neat dark suit, lay a large young man.

He recognized Corey Lathrop immediately.

And yet this seemed as if it must be some mad materialization of his own thoughts.

He dropped to his knees. There was a blood-caked hole in the jacket just about where the heart would be. Mark Liddon picked up a cold, limp wrist and felt a pulse that was not there.

Corey Lathrop wasn’t a mirage. He was here all right. And he was just as certainly dead.

MARK LIDDON got up and stood very still. He could feel the sweat trickling down from his armpits. He thought with a kind of anguished tenderness:

‘My God, what’s the little fool got into now?’

Then, instinctively, he groped for explanations that would put Ellie in the clear. Maybe she had gone away. Maybe she had lent the apartment to Corey. Maybe … He pushed all that aside. He mustn’t start trying to kid himself. Because Ellie was Ellie, because she had an affinity for disaster, she was almost certainly in this up to the neck. This was her jam all right.

And because it was hers, it was his too. He must keep calm. He mustn’t feel. Not yet — not until he had this thing under control. He must work it out coldly like a problem in engineering, reconstruct what had happened, gauge the danger and neutralize it. Later he would start feeling about Ellie.

‘Keep calm.’

He said it to himself in words in his mind. It was a habit he had developed in the early rough and tumble of his boxing days when a crisis had materialized in the ring. The actual shape of the words had seemed to have some magic power for him, and now he found that the charm still had its effect. He felt a little giddy. That was all and that would pass.

‘Keep calm.’

He squatted down again by the body, the skirts of his bathrobe sliding back from his bare knees. He touched a cold cheek. He knew practically nothing about rigor mortis, but he could see that the jaw had begun to stiffen and elongate. Corey hadn’t been dead long. A couple of hours, maybe. He searched for a gun. He couldn’t find one. It was crazy, then, to hope for suicide. He might as well accept the fact too.

He crossed to the bar and poured a shot of Scotch into a tumbler. There were two soiled glasses standing side by side next to a whisky bottle. Two — Corey and Ellie? That was bad too. His reflection was thrown back to him from a mirror behind the bar. With the old grey bathrobe wrapped around him and his light hair spiky from the shower, he looked absurdly informal for a man facing the greatest ordeal of his life. He sat down on one of the stools, sipping the liquor, thinking.

Two dirty glasses. No gun. No Ellie. She had killed him, then? And fled in a panic with the gun? Because that’s what Ellie would have done. If something bad had happened, she wouldn’t have hung around, she would have run away from it.

It was amazing, in a way, how clearly he understood her shortcomings and accepted them without criticism. Yes, Ellie would have run away. But there was something else about her that was far more important, something he was as certain of as he could be certain of anything. However wild she was, Ellie could never be cold or calculating. If she’d killed Corey, there’d been an accident, maybe, or some situation which had to have this ending. She could kill like a kid, but not like a murderess. But what had happened here to end in murder didn’t matter yet.

It was what he was going to do to straighten it out that mattered.

Against all probability, he felt a kind of excitement. His masculinity, his function as his wife’s protector, was being put to the test.

He accepted the challenge.

He finished the Scotch. It had made him icily calm. Already he had decided what he would have to do. Mark had none of the instincts of an outlaw. Unless there were completely unforeseen elements, he would sooner or later go to the police. That was only common sense. He and Ellie could not spend the rest of their lives as fugitives. But he would have to find Ellie first, learn what had happened, coach her into a reasonable story. To call the police now and have to admit that she had run away would be fatal for her. She’d never stand a chance in court — particularly since Corey had been an ex-fiancé. No, it was imperative to find her before the police found Corey. And to find her would take time. By now she might be almost anywhere. Certainly she would never come back here.

Tomorrow morning, around nine, Ellie’s old Swedish maid would arrive. If the body was still here, she would see it. That gave him only a few hours’ leeway in which to find Ellie. A few hours were not enough.

Okay, there was only one thing to do. He’d have to get Corey out of here.

This decision, so wildly different from anything he had ever expected to have to do, seemed perfectly natural to him. His exaggerated calm made him feel that he had never been more lucid. To conceal a body was a criminal offence. Okay. That couldn’t be avoided. Things were bad enough already; they might as well be that much worse.

But, for the eventual show-down with the police, he drew, on a sheet of Ellie’s elegant grey stationery, a precise, engineer’s diagram indicating the exact position of the body. At least that would show that he was not being irresponsible. Having completed it, he folded it neatly and put it in his bathrobe pocket.

He sat down again on a bar stool, looking at Corey. Whatever his plan for the body’s removal, he would need a car. He did not own one himself, but Ellie’s Cadillac was parked in a garage a couple of blocks away. At least, it was if she hadn’t gone off with it. Before he did anything else he’d have to go around and check.

He dressed in the bedroom, putting on the same clothes he had worn in the plane and transferring the diagram to his jacket pocket. He glanced through Ellie’s closets, trying to find out whether she had taken any baggage with her, but she had so many clothes that he couldn’t be sure.

His tactical plan was already half formulated. The service elevator was self-operating and the man who worked it during the day was off duty at eight-thirty. On the ground floor a service door opened into an alley which led to the crosstown street. If he parked the Cadillac at the mouth of the alley, he could bring the body down in the elevator and, maybe, manage to carry it to the car without being seen. At least there would be no danger from the man on the front elevator.

After that … the rest of the plan was still vague. Perhaps he could take the body and dump it either by the river or in the park. The simplest plan was usually the safest.

He put on his topcoat in the foyer and moved out into the vestibule. He pressed the button of the service elevator; a little red eye winked on. When the cage came up he stepped inside. Someone had left an old mop and a pail of dirty water in it. He rode down with them to the ground floor. He had never been there at night before, and the anxious thought came that perhaps the door leading to the alley was locked. But it was merely bolted on the inside. He released the long bolt, and, stepping out, drew the door almost shut, so that, to a superficial glance, it would seem to be closed.

It was still snowing. He moved down the hundred or so feet of the alley to its mouth, paused, glanced to left and right, and then went out into the deserted street. On this hurried walk to the garage he passed only a scattering of pedestrians. None of them looked at him. Their heads were bent low against upturned collars. The snow, blurring identity, shut each of them off in a little world of his own.

He reached the garage. The dim overhead lights of its lower floor revealed packed, gleaming rows of automobiles. Joe, the night attendant, was not visible.

The large cement ramp loomed in front of him. Ellie’s normal parking place was upstairs. As he started towards the ramp he heard a clatter deep in the garage and saw for a moment the dungareed figure of Joe stooping over a car at the back.

His rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the cement, he walked up the ramp. The upper floor was enormous and desolate. The cars, parked in long parallel lines, seemed to be waiting for some sudden inrush of people that would bring them bursting to life. He moved along the broad central aisle. With quickening of his pulses, he saw the sleek rear end of Ellie’s Cadillac parked where it usually stood, just a few cars from the sliding doors which led to Dead Storage.

So far so good.

He squeezed past a Town and Country Buick and reached the driver’s door of the Cadillac. As he opened it he happened to glance towards the doors to Dead Storage. They were ajar. A sudden idea came. He skirted the Buick again and moved through the narrow aperture between the sliding doors into the dark interior of the space beyond.

Around him, visible only as faint, unrelated gleams of metal, stretched the cars, set up on blocks, which had been put away for the winter. Why wouldn’t this be a far safer dumping place for Corey than a haphazard location by the river or in the park, where he would certainly be discovered before morning? Once a car was laid up for the winter, who would look for it? It was cold here too - cold like a refrigeration plant. If he could smuggle the body past the attendant, it might not be discovered for weeks. That would give him excellent control of the time element. Corey could stay there until he was ready to produce him again.

He groped his way to the car nearest him and tried the door handle. It opened. With a twinge of elation, he returned to the garage proper. It would be safer if Joe didn’t hear him take the Cadillac out, even though it would be no tragedy if he did. He pushed the car to the head of the ramp and coasted down, going into gear only when he had swung into the street. He was practically sure that Joe had noticed nothing.

He drove to the apartment house, parked the Cadillac at the opening of the alley and returned to the apartment by the service elevator.

As he passed the bedroom, he caught once again the fleeting fragrance of Ellie’s perfume. A sudden longing for his wife and for a reasonable, ordinary homecoming overwhelmed him, almost cracking his somnambulistic calm.

‘Ellie,’ he thought, Ellie, baby, where are you?’

But in a moment he had the situation in hand again. Later - for all that. He turned on one light in the living-room and climbed the stairs, past the iron balustrade with its trailing vines - back into the bar.

IN the vague light from downstairs the body seemed large and menacing. He dropped at its side. In his mind he still called it Corey Lathrop, but he had made himself deny its humanity and think of it as an object - a nondescript something which had to be removed from here and dumped in a winter-stored car.

He rolled it over on its face. Easing his shoulder under its stomach, he rose slowly until he was erect with it slumped over his shoulder, the long legs dangling in front of him. He moved to the head of the stairs and started down them, steadying himself with his free hand against the iron banister. Although his muscles were in perfect condition, he found Corey far heavier than he had imagined possible. On the bottom step he stumbled and the corpse sagged off balance. Before he could right himself, he fell sprawling into the living-room. The body, cold and impersonal, rolled after him.

He got up and stood for a moment panting. It would probably be easier to drag it. He gripped the hands and started to pull the resisting hulk towards the front door. It knocked against the table leg, making a lamp totter. He felt absurd anger welling up against it.

At the door he dumped it and moved out into the vestibule. The service elevator was still there from his upward trip. He propped the door back with the mop and the pail of dirty water and, dragging Corey inside, laid him half upright against the wall. He brought the mop and pail in and closed the door.

As he did so, Corey lurched sideways and down, sending the mop clattering and overtilting the pail. The noise, in that confined space, seemed deafening, and Mark felt the dirty water sliding clammily around his shoes.

Downstairs, he made sure the coast was clear and then brought the body out into the alley. With the snow acting as a slide, it was easy to pull it along and the tracks would soon be obliterated. There were lighted windows above him, but he was almost sure the alley itself was too dark for anyone to see him. Somewhere, far off, a radio or a phonograph was playing. He could just make out soprano voices caroling: Hark the Herald Angels Sing.