The Morning After Death Page 11

  “You know Josiah’s half brothers resented that. They disliked his talebearing to you, his taking your side against them always.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” said the old man grimly, “but you don’t kill your brother for talebearing.”

  “Did Josiah ever say anything to you about Mark’s relationship with Miss Tate? Or Chester’s?”

  “I believe he’d persuaded Chester to sever the relationship last spring. And he wrote me a month or two ago, saying he believed he could deal with Mark if necessary.”

  “Considering that Mark and Chester favored the same girl—have they always been very close?”

  “I should say never. They’re very, very different types, of course. Chester was never wild: he gave no trouble; and unfortunately he cut no ice either. I shouldn’t say it about my own son, but he’s a cipher and I’m afraid he always will be. A zero. I wanted to put him into one of my concerns when he left college, but instead he has to become a teacher.” Mr. Ahlberg spat out the opprobrious word with the utmost contempt.

  “Very distressing for you.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I approve of education. I built this House for Cabot, didn’t I? Josiah was highly esteemed in the world of scholarship. But teaching in a Business School! You might as well spend your life playing at toy soldiers.” The tortoise had shot forward on the scrawny neck. “I’m an old man, Mr. Strangeways. If Mark got into bad trouble, it would kill me. You must see to it that he doesn’t.”

  “You’ve a soft spot for him, in spite of everything?”

  “I guess you’re right. Mark’s got some of his old dad’s red blood in him. But he knows on which side his bread is buttered. There’ve been some violent episodes in his past, and perhaps he could have killed a man in hot blood, but he’d never do it in a treacherous way—not like poor Josiah was killed.” The old man’s flat voice shook.

  “I hope you’re right, Mr. Ahlberg.”

  Josiah’s father departed shortly after, leaving Nigel to contemplate this strange mixture of the shrewd, the maudlin, the autocratic and the wildly erroneous to which he had been treated. He sat for a long time, trying to separate out Mr. Ahlberg’s qualities and trace each one to Josiah, Mark or Chester. It was a sterile occupation. . . .

  Late that afternoon Mark called to him from the court beneath his window and Nigel invited him up.

  “How did it go?” Nigel asked.

  “Brady let me off. Provisionally. With a caution. Don’t withhold evidence again, or— The fact is, he’s baffled. The fact is, I’m much more frightened of you—the way you turn this whole affair into an intellectual game and trap your friends, the suspects, into playing with you.”

  “Do you mean to say that Brady’s willing to pass over your finding Josiah’s body and saying nothing about it?”

  “Seemingly. I dare say he’s just paying out more rope for me to hang myself with. Still, I’ll say it’s a relief right now. And I have the benefit of a quiet conscience. Unless some son of a bitch frames some real evidence against me, why should I worry?” Mark Ahlberg, the interview behind him, was in a manic phase, beaming, sparkling, carefree.

  “You didn’t see your father? He was lunching with Zeke. I had a chat with him.”

  “Did you now? What was he trying to sell you?”

  “He was trying to buy me—he wants John Tate sent to the chair, and you saved from it.”

  “Very loyal. What else?” Mark asked.

  “He told me he approves of education. And he clearly has a certain unwilling admiration for you.”

  “Really? Since when?”

  “He thinks of you as a chip—a very small chip—off the old block. A playboy who has sobered up. I thought it would be unkind to reveal to him your low passion for cheesecake.”

  “My what?”

  “You subscribe to Playboy, don’t you?”

  “I don’t subscribe to it; I have bought a copy occasionally. Why?”

  “There was one on your table the other day. It seems to have disappeared, by the way.”

  Mark looked politely uninterested.

  “The trouble is, it had a picture cut out of it. And the same picture—that stunning nude redhead—was stuck onto the photograph of Chester. The one some joker pinned on the Hall door.”

  Mark gazed at Nigel incredulously. His mouth opened and closed. He shook his head, as though a fly were tormenting him. “Are you suggesting that I faked up that poster?” he said at last.

  “My dear Mark, it’s no concern of mine if you tease your brother.”

  “But I didn’t!” Mark burst out. “I didn’t! I wouldn’t do a ridiculous thing like that. It’s not adult. The Faculty just don’t go around making monkeys of one another in such a childish way. The idea is utterly crazy. Why, I’d be out on my neck in a minute, if— Do you think anyone would risk his job for the sake of playing such a juvenile trick?”

  “No. Not for that.”

  An apprehensive look came into Mark’s face. “My God! What I was saying—it looks as though someone is trying to frame evidence against me.”

  9 “A Funeral in My Brain”

  LIEUTENANT BRADY WAS a worried man. He paced Nigel’s room as if it were a prison cell. “These people get me down. I can deal with hoods. I know how their minds work. But college instructors!—they’re always at least one jump ahead. They have all the answers, or think they do. Like talking books they are.”

  “You let Mark Ahlberg off the hook, he tells me.”

  “I could pull him in, but what’s the use? So he goes into his brother’s room and finds him dead. So he walks out again, washes his hands of it. It could be. If he’d shot him already, what did he come back for?”

  “Anxiety? Afraid he’d left some clue behind?”

  Brady shook his head dispiritedly. “I’ve worked on him. I had men working on him since the killing. There is nothing, repeat nothing, to connect him with it.”

  “Except motive and opportunity. So you’re letting him loose in the hope he’ll do something silly? Like killing his other brother?”

  Brady shot Nigel a sharp green glance. “It could happen. I just wish he’d rid me of Pa Ahlberg first. The old s.o.b. clings to me like a hairshirt.”

  “Have you thought the two brothers might be in collusion?”

  “Now, isn’t that a sweet idea! Tell me all about it.”

  Nigel spoke for some time. Tried out on Brady, the theory did not sound so brilliant. When he reached the practical-joke aspect of it, the Lieutenant gave his harsh bark of laughter.

  “So it’s got you too—this academic fantasy building. How did Mark react when you told him he’d been wishing redheads onto his brother?”

  “He denied it. He appeared deeply shocked.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But the fact remains: he had this copy of Playboy, and he doesn’t have it any longer. He thinks somebody must be planting evidence on him.”

  “I’d believe anything in a madhouse like this,” Brady said. “Anything except a guy persecuting his brother to prove the two of them didn’t knock off a third. Have you any more crazy suggestions for me? What about Master Edwardes? Maybe he had some scandal he didn’t want exposed. Maybe Josiah caught him in bed with the President’s wife.”

  “I can supply a sex angle. But it’s probably only a subplot. You interview Charles Reilly?”

  “The red-haired guy? Writes poetry? Sure—routine questions. Why?”

  “Josiah caught him trying to rape Sukie Tate.”

  Brady stared. “Well, what do you know! You should be writing for the tabloids, Mr. Strangeways.”

  Nigel told him the story. “There could be a motive there. And Reilly was in the I.R.A. Those chaps were quick on the trigger.”

  The telephone rang. It was a call for Brady. When he had taken the message, he turned to Nigel. “There’s another of your beautiful theories liquidated. No one answering to Chester Ahlberg’s name or description flew in from Britain that night. Two of my men have been
toting photographs of him around the airport: they tried passenger lists, customs control and the passport desk; they even rustled up some stewardesses on the possible international flights. Nothing. They’re good men, they don’t make mistakes.”

  “Well, that seems to eliminate Chester. Have you got any further with John Tate?”

  “He’s a queer cookie. The psycho says he has manic-depressive tendencies. The doc’s been working on him hard, trying to get a coherent story of where he was between finding the body and giving himself up. We’ve quite an itinerary now—young Tate’s memory seems to be improving. We haven’t found any witness yet who’s certain he saw him. We’re still going ’round cafés and eateries which Tate thinks he may have visited.”

  “In case he got rid of a gun there?”

  “I have to investigate his story. Helps to fend off Pa Ahlberg. Not that I believe it—not one little bit.”

  Nigel felt sorry about having sent a sizable section of the homicide squad on a wild-goose chase, but it was too late now to disillusion them. His bad conscience made him a little aggressive. “Sukie Tate tells me your men tried to break her down by saying John had confessed. I don’t like that.”

  Brady’s gaze was hard. “We’re investigating a murder, not playing checkers. What’s this girl to you anyway?”

  “A girl.”

  “She was hiding him? She knew where he was hidden?”

  “If that is true, it’s irrelevant. You’ve got him now. Look, Brady, do you honestly think he’s a murderer?”

  “No comment.”

  Nigel sighed. “It’d do no harm to turn the heat on Charles Reilly for a change.”

  “You think he’s a murderer?”

  “No comment.” . . .

  “Charles was stopping last night with friends in Concord. I thought I’d drive out and bring him back this evening. Would you care to accompany me?”

  “That’d be very nice, Chester. Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry Mark can’t make it. He’d be a more knowledgeable guide for a literary pilgrimage.”

  Nigel politely declined any excessive enthusiasm for literary pilgrimages, and confessed to having never read Walden.

  Chester seemed disappointed. “But the woods should be very colorful at this time of year,” he said.

  They drove out of the city in brilliant sunshine, a vapor trail fraying out in the blue sky far overhead. Chester, in a suit of funereal black and black kid gloves, a fedora on his head, negotiated the Sunday forenoon traffic with his usual care. The car heater was turned to full strength: Nigel, feeling drowsy already, settled down to a boring ride, and possible lecture.

  “I had a talk with your father,” he said finally, to keep himself awake.

  Chester did not withdraw his eyes from the road ahead. “Is that so? You know I feel that he stood up to the ordeal remarkably well for a man of his age.”

  “So did I,” said Nigel.

  “I didn’t realize you had attended the funeral.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, I didn’t, I’m afraid. It must have been a notable—er—occasion,” Nigel hurriedly added.

  Chester enumerated the academic dignitaries who had been present, and gave a synopsis of the President’s valedictory address.

  Presently they were driving through a New England village, passing a white clapboard church with an elegant spire, and a graveyard beside it.

  “What I don’t seem able to get out of my head is the noise the clods make dropping on the coffin,” said Chester unexpectedly. “It’s so final—and yet so sort of banal. At the time, I couldn’t work up any response. It was like—like being anesthetized.”

  Nigel quoted:

  “I felt a funeral in my brain

  And mourners to and fro,

  Kept treading, treading, till it seemed

  That sense was breaking through.

  And when they all were seated,

  A service like a drum

  Kept beating, beating, till I thought

  My mind was going numb.”

  “Yes,” said Chester soberly. “That’s very apposite.”

  “The mourners shuttling back and forth. An image of the ineluctable and the futile. What’s the matter, Chester? Are you feeling all right?”

  Chester braked to the roadside and opened a window.

  “Sorry. I guess I was momentarily overcome.”

  “The car is very hot.”

  “Josiah and I had our differences. But blood is thicker than water. And when—when your brother dies, he takes a piece of your past away with him—a piece of your foundations.”

  Autumn wind blew through the car, frozen and pine-scented. Shivering, Chester closed the window, drove on. They stopped later at a wayside café, where Nigel devoured blueberry doughnuts and a jumbo-size chocolate ice cream, and his companion ate a carefully chosen, well-balanced lunch which, Nigel felt, must have scrupulously followed some dietitian’s chart. At Concord, Chester made straight for the woods, which on this fall Sunday wore a Joseph’s coat of color, maple, sumac and birch leaves predominating. They walked down the track to the edge of the lake, which curved away into the distance, and sat down to admire a scene unchanged since Thoreau had gazed at it from his hermit’s hut. The tension seemed to have drained away out of Chester’s face: he breathed in the pure air deeply: his body relaxed: he had the expression of one who is playing truant from routine preoccupations.

  The beauties of nature, however, though they could attract Nigel, seldom held him long. He turned to the proper study of mankind. “Mark taking Sukie out for the day?”

  Chester made an effort to return to the everyday world. “I believe he planned to.”

  “I suppose there’ll not be the same opposition to their marrying now.”

  “There won’t? I don’t see—why, father surely hasn’t changed his views about that, has he? Did he say something to that effect to you?”

  “I was thinking of Josiah. He was very hostile too, Sukie told me.”

  Chester looked puzzled. Frowned. “That’s rather an overstatement.”

  “Well, he seems to have put obstacles in the way, when you had an understanding with her.”

  “Oh, there was nothing definite as far as I was concerned, you know,” said Chester evasively. “In any event, Mark suits her better.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought he was serious enough. She’s such an earnest girl. Rather overpowering. She can’t approve of Mark’s frivolous side, can she?”

  Chester stirred uncomfortably. “I’ve not discussed him with her. And Mark generally gets what he wants.”

  “The Joker takes the Queen?”

  A birch leaf eddied down onto Chester’s knee. He did not brush it off.

  “I don’t quite get you.”

  “Well, he was a great joker in his young days, wasn’t he?” Nigel paused to light a cigarette. “The question is—is he still?”

  “Mark is a fully responsible member of society,” replied Chester firmly.

  “So it’s just a coincidence that he had a copy of Playboy with that nude cut out—the one used with your photograph on the poster?”

  Chester went rigid, staring at him: the left corner of his mouth trembled, and he put up a hand to cover it. “But that’s—I just cannot believe it. Are you sure of your facts?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “But what does he say? There must be some explanation.”

  “He says someone must have planted it on him.”

  “Well, naturally. What else could it have been?”

  “That copy of Playboy has since disappeared. If someone else planted it on Mark, why should that person bother to remove it?”

  A fitful breeze ruffled the pewter surface of Walden Pond. It was like the Americans, thought Nigel irrelevantly, to call a considerable lake a pond.

  “No, no. Really, I would never believe it of Mark.” Chester’s eyes had a haunted look, though, and he spoke like one trying too hard to convince himself.

&
nbsp; “There have been other practical jokes played on you this year. Was it a habit of Mark’s when he was younger?”

  “Well, I suppose you might say—I guess so. He liked to tease me. But it was just high spirits—I never held it against him, you know; that was just Mark. He hazed Josiah too, once or twice.”

  “But this is a different matter,” Nigel persisted. “Whoever’s been doing it, it’s not out of high spirits: emotional immaturity, perhaps, but that would only shape the pattern—it would not provide the motive. Is there any history of insanity in your family?”

  Chester looked startled and somewhat affronted. “There certainly is not,” he protested.

  “Are you sure?” Nigel asked quietly.

  “Mark has always been perfectly sane.”

  “What about yourself?”

  Chester flushed. “You do ask the most extraordinary questions. I don’t see why you feel— Well, if you must know, I had a nervous breakdown when I was seventeen. But I don’t see what—”

  “Paranoia?”

  “Now see here, Nigel, I resent this—this—it’s indecent.”

  “But it’s very much to the point. Did anyone outside your family know about this breakdown?”

  “I guess not. And the doctors, of course.”

  “So, if someone wanted to disturb your mind again, he would— Oh, perhaps he’d encourage you to feel you were being persecuted. Practical jokes are a fairly sinister form of persecution.”

  Chester’s hands, still in the black kid gloves, dangled between his knees as he sat, bowed forward.

  “And no one outside your family knows of the previous breakdown,” pressed Nigel.

  “Okay, okay, you don’t have to spell it out. But there must be something wrong. Why should Mark do this to me? There’s no sense in it. It’s just inconceivable.”