The Seducer

20

At first Brad had been angry, and then he had been frightened, but now, near the end of the exhausting ordeal of evasions and lies and damning admissions, he was only very tired.

“All right.” He drew a hand across his forehead, pressing hard against the dull pain above his eyes. “I went there, to the apartment, but I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I arrived. She was lying on the floor, and I could see immediately that she was dead.”

“Sure.” Trajan’s voice came from shadows beyond the perimeter of focused light. “She was lying on the floor, and she looked dead. So you just turned and left. You didn’t call a doctor. You didn’t call the police. You didn’t do anything an innocent man would have done. You just turned and left.”

“I was frightened. I’ve told you that. I could think of nothing but getting away as quickly as possible.”

“Why did you go there in the first place?”

“I wanted to talk with Maggie. Miss McCall.”

“Did you go there often?”

“No. It was only the second time.”

“But you saw Miss McCall often. Isn’t that true?”

“I suppose so. Fairly often.”

“You were having an affair. Isn’t it true that you were having an affair even before the death of your wife? Don’t try to lie. We have the evidence.”

“It’s true. We were going to be married after a while.”

“Is that why you killed your wife? So you could marry Maggie McCall?”

“I didn’t kill my wife.”

“So you didn’t. You were somewhere else when it happened. What you did was hire someone to kill her.”

“No. That’s not true. I hired no one.”

Trajan’s bulk shifted in the shadows. His voice was assured and soft and almost gentle, the harsh dyspeptic hatred apparently having diminished or drained away in its hour of triumph.

“Well, Dr. Cannon, no matter. No matter at all. You killed Maggie McCall, and that’s enough. You were seen entering the building at the time of the murder, and you were seen running away. We have the witness, and we have you, and motives are a dime a dozen in a mess like this. We could almost take our pick. You get the picture, Dr. Cannon? You’re dead. You’re guilty and you’re dead.”

Brad’s mind was sluggish, moving uncertainly in a fog of dull pain, and it was only with the greatest effort of concentration that he could think coherently about what he should say or not say, or if there was anything left to be said at all.

He sat staring at the floor, and one thing, after a while, seemed assured. He had walked blindly into a trap — the littered little apartment where Maggie had lain dead, and there was no escape. No escape for Bradley Cannon.

He considered dully the possible advantages of confessing the truth about Madelaine’s death, which would reduce him to a conspirator instead of a murderer. This would really accomplish nothing, of course, for he was not charged with Madelaine’s murder, and now that Maggie was dead, could never be. It would help nothing to confess, nothing at all, and in fact it would only make matters worse, for it would give him a damning motive for killing Maggie, whom he had not killed.

Trajan, and later the prosecutor, would surely take the position that he had killed her, after the murder of Madelaine, because she was a menace to his security. It was ironical, being untrue, but he could not laugh. He was so tired, his head so filled with dull pain, that he couldn’t for the present even care.

He had acquired in the slow and painful consummation of his ruin a kind of immunity to further fear, and although this would pass and fear return, he felt now only a dumb wonder that Bradley Cannon had come at last to this bad end. He couldn’t believe it. It was surely no more a vivid delusion, a fantastic trick of the mind, and it must be someone else, some other man, who sat here on a hard chair in bright light without hope.

He looked up from the floor to test the delusion, and Trajan’s face was a livid smear against the shadows beyond the light.