“I know that. What now?”
“I think it’s the wife.” Levine motioned to Gundy, who came over, and he said, “Is the partner here? Anderson?”
“Sure,” said Gundy. “He’s in his office. He tried to talk to Cartwright once, but Cartwright got too excited. We thought it would be a good idea if Anderson kept out of sight.”
“Who thought? Anderson?”
“Well, yes. All of us. Anderson and McCann and me.”
“Okay,” said Levine. “You and the boy — what’s his name, Allan? — stay here. Let me know what’s happening, if anything at all does happen. We’ll go talk with Mister Anderson now.”
Anderson was short, slender, very brisk, very bald. His wire-framed spectacles reflected light, and his round little face was troubled. “No warning at all,” he said. “Not a word. All of a sudden, Joan — she’s our receptionist — got a call from someone across the street, saying there was a man on the ledge. And it was Jason. Just like that! No warning at all.”
“The sign on your door,” said Crawley, “says Industrial Research. What’s that, efficiency expert stuff?”
Anderson smiled, a quick nervous flutter. “Not exactly,” he said. He was devoting all his attention to Crawley, who was standing directly in front of him and who was asking the questions. Levine stood to one side, watching the movements of Anderson’s lips and eyes and hands as he spoke.
“We are efficiency experts, in a way,” Anderson was saying, “but not in the usual sense of the term. We don’t work with time-charts, or how many people should work in the steno pool, things like that. Our major concern is the physical plant itself, the structure and design of the plant buildings and work areas.”
Crawley nodded. “Architects,” he said.
Anderson’s brief smile fluttered on his face again, and he shook his head. “No, we work in conjunction with the architect, if it’s a new building. But most of our work is concerned with the modernization of old facilities. In a way, we’re a central clearing agency for new ideas in industrial plant procedures.” It was, thought Levine, an explanation Anderson was used to making, so used to making that it sounded almost like a memorized patter.
“You and Cartwright equal partners?” asked Crawley. It was clear he hadn’t understood a word of Anderson’s explanation and was impatient to move on to other things.
Anderson nodded. “Yes, we are. We’ve been partners for twenty-one years.”
“You should know him well, then.”
“I should think so, yes.”
“Then maybe you know why he suddenly decided to go crawl out on the ledge.”
Eyes widening, Anderson shook his head again. “Not a thing,” he said. “I had no idea, nothing, I— There just wasn’t any warning at all.”
Levine stood off to one side, watching, his lips pursed in concentration. Was Anderson telling the truth? It seemed likely; it felt likely. The marriage again. It kept going back to the marriage.
“Has he acted at all funny lately?” Crawley was still pursuing the same thought, that there had to be some previous build-up, and that the build-up should show. “Has he been moody, anything like that?”
“Jason—” Anderson stopped, shook his head briefly, started again. “Jason is a quiet man, by nature. He... he rarely uh, forces his personality, if you know what I mean. If he’s been thinking about this, whatever it is, it... it wouldn’t show, I don’t think it would show.”
“Would he have any business worries at all?” Crawley undoubtedly realized by now this was a blind alley, but he would go through the normal questions anyway. You never could tell.
Anderson, as was to be expected, said, “No, none. We’ve... well, we’ve been doing very well. The last five years, we’ve been expanding steadily, we’ve even added to our staff, just six months ago.”
Levine now spoke for the first time. “What about Mrs. Cartwright?” he asked.
Anderson looked blank, as he turned to face Levine. “Mrs. Cartwright? I... I don’t understand what you mean.”
Crawley immediately picked up the new ball, took over the questioning again. “Do you know her well. Mister Anderson? What kind of woman would you say she was?”
Anderson turned back to Crawley, once again opening his flank to Levine. “She’s, well, actually I haven’t seen very much of her the last few years. Jason moved out of Manhattan five, six years ago, over to Jersey, and I live out on the Island, so we don’t, uh, we don’t socialize very much, as much as we used to. As you get older—” he turned to face Levine, as though instinctively understanding that Levine would more readily know what he meant, “you don’t go out so much any more, in the evening. You don’t, uh, keep up friendships as much as you used to.”
“You must know something about Mrs. Cartwright,” said Crawley.
Anderson gave his attention to Crawley again. “She’s, well, I suppose the best way to describe her is determined. I know for a fact she was the one who talked Jason into coming into partnership with me, twenty-one years ago. A forceful woman. Not a nag, mind you, I don’t mean that at all. A very pleasant woman really. A good hostess. A good mother, from the look of Allan. But forceful.”
The wife, thought Levine. She’s the root of it. She knows, too, what drove him out there.
And she wants him to jump.
Back in Cartwright’s office, the son Allan was once again at the phone. The patrolman Gundy was at the left-hand window, and a new man, in clerical garb, at the right-hand window.
Gundy noticed Levine and Crawley come in, and immediately left the window. “A priest,” he said softly. “Anderson said he was Catholic, so we got in touch with St. Marks, over on Willoughby.”
Levine nodded. He was listening to the son. “I don’t know, mother. Of course, mother, we’re doing everything we can. No, mother, no reporters up here, maybe it won’t have to be in the papers at all.”
Levine went over to the window Gundy had vacated, took up a position where he could see Cartwright, carefully refrained from looking down at the ground. The priest was saying, “God has his time for you, Mister Cartwright. This is God’s prerogative, to choose the time and the means of your death.”
Cartwright shook his head, not looking at the priest, glaring instead directly across Flatbush Avenue at the building across the way. “There is no God,” he said.
“I don’t believe you mean that, Mister Cartwright,” said the priest. “I believe you’ve lost your faith in yourself, but I don’t believe you’ve lost faith in God.”
“Take that away!” screamed Cartwright all at once. “Take that away, or I jump right now!”
He was staring down toward the street, and Levine followed the direction of his gaze. Poles had been extended from windows on the floor below, and a safety net, similar to that used by circus performers, was being unrolled along them.
“Take that away!” screamed Cartwright again. He was leaning precariously forward, his face mottled red with fury and terror.
“Roll that back in!” shouted Levine. “Get it out of there, he can jump over it! Roll it back in!”
A face jutted out of one of the fifth-floor windows, turning inquiringly upward, saying, “Who are you?”
“Levine. Precinct. Get that thing away from there.”
“Right you are,” said the face, making it clear he accepted no responsibility either way. And the net and poles were withdrawn.
The priest, on the other side, was saying, “It’s all right. Relax, Mr. Cartwright; it’s all right. These people only want to help you; it’s all right.” The priest’s voice was shaky. Like Gundy, he was a rookie at this. He’d never been asked to talk in a suicide before.