“You better go to a doctor about that, Lieutenant,” Freeman said. “It might be cancer.”
Trajan left the room without another word, walking across to the door from the bed with short, quick steps, almost mincing, that seemed somehow obscene in relation to his gross body. He gave no overt sign of the obsessive fear, aroused by Freeman’s words, that kept company inside him with his possible malignancy.
Descending the stairs into the lower hall, he passed a policeman in uniform and went into the living room where Brad sat slumped in a chair in front of the cold fireplace. Dragging a straight chair into position alongside, Trajan sat down and leaned forward. Laughter, secret and sour, stirred within him when Brad’s head turned away from a current of polluted breath.
“How are you feeling?” Trajan said.
“Very tired and confused.” Brad looked at Trajan and away. His voice was apathetic, his eyes lusterless.
He appeared to be in a state of shock. “I simply can’t believe it. It can’t be true.”
“It’s true, all right. Your wife’s dead. Murdered. What time was it when you found her body?”
“I told you that before. A little after eleven. When I came home from a faculty meeting.”
“Who else was at the meeting?”
“Members of the department. The Mathematics Department. I gave the names to the other policeman. Freeman. He wrote them down.”
“Yes. So you did. He’s already checked with some of them, but I’ll check again. I’ll check and check and check, and maybe sooner or later someone will remember something significant he had been forgetting before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just the way I work. Are you sure you can’t think of anyone who would be glad to have your wife dead?”
“God, no! Such an idea is fantastic. It must have been a burglar. Someone who killed her when she woke up and surprised him in the room.”
“Nothing was taken. You said so yourself. What kind of burglar takes nothing away with him?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t have time. Perhaps he became frightened and fled after killing Madelaine. It’s reasonable to assume that he did.”
“Now that’s a nice thing about being on a case where a bright guy like you is concerned. He’s always available to tell me what’s reasonable and what’s not reasonable. Being reasonable, Dr. Cannon, you might care to comment on the fact that there was no sign of breaking and entering. No window jimmied open. No door forced. No sign at all of B & E. Does that seem reasonable? Does that seem like burglary?”
“The back door must have been left unlocked. He must have tried the door and simply walked in.”
“The back door? Why? Why not the front door?”
“Because I left by the front door, and I remember locking it. It was still locked when I returned home.”
“You don’t remember locking the back door?”
“No. As I recall, I neglected to check it.”
“Were you usually so careless?”
“Usually, when I went out alone at night, my wife was up and presumably locked it herself.”
“But tonight she had gone to bed early. Isn’t that what you said? With a sick headache.”
“That’s right. She took a sedative and went to bed.”
“Did she frequently have these headaches?”
“Quite often. I suppose you could say frequently.”
“It all worked out pretty conveniently, didn’t it?”
“Conveniently? I don’t understand.”
“Well, for this hypothetical burglar who didn’t steal anything. You gone, your wife in bed under sedation, the back door unlocked. Wouldn’t you say that was all pretty convenient?”
“What in the name of God are you implying?” Brad demanded.
“Am I implying something?”
“It seems to me that you are, and it may be that you’ll regret it. Frankly, Lieutenant, you’ve been as offensive and brutal under the circumstances as you could possibly be. You may be sure that I’ll say so to the county attorney, who is a friend of mine, at the first opportunity.”
Trajan stood up. He looked down at Brad with dull and venomous eyes, his hatred alive and virulent and wholly irrational. It occurred to him that it might be smart to start looking for another woman. A great, griping pain was in his belly, and his belch, which he could not restrain, had the effect of a deliberate and vulgar insult.
“You do that, Dr. Cannon,” he said. “You talk to the county attorney.”
He heard an ambulance pull up in the street at last, and he turned and walked out into the hall.
17
Buddy sat in Maggie’s room and waited for Maggie to come back from wherever she was. He had been sitting there for a long time, but he didn’t care or even know that the time had been long, for he had no place else to go and nothing at all to do, and it was a great comfort to be there in the familiar stale litter where he had found, before things had changed and gone to hell, as much of happiness and peace as it was possible for him to know.
He loved Maggie in his own compulsive and destructive way, and he had been terribly lonely and strangely afraid without her. He did not think that he could bear the fear and loneliness much longer.
His world had reverted, in fact, to the conditions prior to Maggie’s entrance, a world of dark fantasy entailing fantastic threats to which he reacted with a bitter and brutal belligerence that was fear disguised. It was a world of reference and apathetic rage in which he felt compelled to do anything just to be doing something, although it was quite impossible in his lethargy to do anything whatever.
He had quit attending the classes he had been failing anyhow. Some days he took food, hardly knowing that he ate, and some days he fasted without awareness that he did. He drank cheap wine and got sick and made worse what was already intolerably bad.
He had come several times to see Maggie, to plead and threaten and do what he could to recover what he had lost, but she wouldn’t open the door and let him in, and he had finally been forced each time to go away.
Today, however, he had come and found her gone, her door locked, and he had let himself in with the blade of his pocketknife. Now he sat in her litter, drinking her wine, and waited for her to come home. It was light when he arrived at her door, but it had since grown dark. The date, although he didn’t know it, was the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s Day.
Secure and comforted in the dark room, he became a little drowsy under the influence of the wine, and he was fixed in a warm and wonderful suspension between sleeping and waking when Maggie opened the door and switched on the ceiling light.
She was carrying something in a brown paper bag, and she walked with the bag into her tiny kitchen and came back without it. Removing her cloth coat, she tossed it toward a chair, where it caught and held for a moment on the arm and then slipped off into a pile on the floor.
All the while she was doing this, walking into the kitchen and walking back and removing her coat, she glanced several times at Buddy as if he were no more than a part of the general litter that would probably eventually need cleaning up.
“How did you get in here?” she said finally. “It seems to me I locked the door when I left.”
“I used my pocketknife,” he said, “and I may use it on you before I leave if you don’t treat me any better than you have been.”
“In that case, you’d better use it on me immediately, because I don’t intend to treat you a damn bit better, and you’re leaving right away.”
“Am I? Try and make me,” he challenged, his brows drawing together above his eyes.
“I could call the police and have you arrested. Don’t you know it’s against the law to break into someone’s private place?”