“But why?” persisted Basil.
“That’s your headache, doc. My job is to catch the guys who do wrong—not to worry about why they do it! Maybe you can tell me why they always push forward at a fire when we tell them to stand back?” The Inspector weighed his next words. “I wish it hadn’t been a knife-grinding shop.”
Basil’s interest quickened as if someone had supplied one of the missing vowels to his anagram. “So that’s it?”
“Looks that way. We made quite sure nothing had been stolen. That can mean only one thing: “Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife—without witnesses.”
“Murder?”
“Sure. With malice prepense. But there’s nothing we can do about it. No fingerprints. No clues. . . .”
Outside in Centre Street, the east wind struck through Basil’s spring overcoat with a sudden, keen thrust. Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife. . . . In his mind’s eye, he saw the dark, faceless figure in the gray, dreamy light just before dawn sliding a moistened thumb along a blade secretly sharpened to a slicing edge. There would be the low humming of a grindstone and a spray of cold blue sparks; but no one would be likely to see or hear anything at that hour in a little shack in an obscure alley running through the theatrical district. Why such stealth unless the purpose were murder in its most inhumane form—with the premeditation of a surgeon and the callous blood-letting of a butcher? That was sound enough as police logic, but . . .
With an almost audible click, new facts and old fell into juxtaposition. His anagram had become less intelligible than ever. If this were murder in its most in humane form, why free the canary?
Like most modern psychiatrists, Basil Willing believed that no human being can ever perform any act without a motive, conscious or unconscious. The unmotivated act was a myth like the unicorn or the sea serpent. Even slips and blunders had their roots in the needs of the emotional nature. He had used his knowledge of that fact to solve his first murder case. But what was the motive here? What feeling had informed the hand that unlatched the door of the canary’s cage yesterday morning?
However pitiful a winged creature in a cage may be, a murderer planning to use a knife against a fellow human being is hardly in the mood for pity. . . .
Chapter Two. Persons in the Play
THE MODERN ART GALLERY was inclosed in a penthouse on Central Park South. The architect prided himself on being “functional,” but he had forgotten that the principal function of a modern building is resistance to air raids. He had made the north wall of the gallery one great sheet of sheer plate glass. After Pearl Harbor, the management had supplemented the glass with two-inch bands of adhesive tape, criss-crossed in a series of tall X’s and sealed flat and taut with an electric iron.
Outside, winter lingered in the Park like an insensitive guest who has long outstayed his welcome. The turf was bald and dry and brown. The skeleton trees made a black mesh against a sultry streak of saffron at the western edge of the white sky. Nurses and children, hurrying east to home and supper, bent their heads forward, unconsciously streamlining themselves in order to cleave the April wind. There was not a hint of green in the landscape, but there was a new freshness in the air that hinted of all the green things to come in a few weeks.
Inside, a crowd of invited guests—largely feminine, furred, perfumed, and voluble—pretended there were no such things as wars and east winds. Soundproof walls shut out traffic noises. A thermostat maintained a temperature as mild and even as that of an embryo. Brilliant, artificial light from concealed sources was refracted in every direction by three blond walls of wax-rubbed pine. There were no shadows. The gallery was a solid cube of light, a medium where people moved and had their being like fish in a tank of illuminated water.
Now and then one of the guests remembered to glance at the paintings on the walls and tell the exiled artist in schoolgirl French that his oeuvre was épatante and vraie Parisienne. For the most part, they sipped cocktails, nibbled macaroons, admired fragments of T’ang pottery on the twin mantelpieces, or sat down to gossip on settees covered with tight, slippery leather in jade green.
A young man and a girl were sitting on one of these settees—the one with its back to the glass wall. The girl was pretty, but there was nothing remarkable in her prettiness. Hundreds of girls have chestnut-brown curls that gleam red when light touches them and gray eyes that seem blue under a blue hat. The freckles across her short nose were faded as if she had changed an outdoor life for an indoor light in the last few years. The women in red fox and rayon velvet and flowered hats looked at the beautiful severity of her tweed suit and decided that she was underdressed. The women in silver fox and bagheera and clever black hats looked at the same suit and wondered if they could be overdressed. Something in the short curl of her upper lip and the tilt of her small, stubborn chin suggested that she cared little for their opinions. Her manner was composed and detached, rather businesslike. On her knee was a sketch pad; in her right hand, a soft, black pencil. From time to time, she sketched something in the crowd that pleased or amused her—a piquant profile, an impossible hat, or an ungainly silhouette.
The young man had slumped down on the seat beside her with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a shade fairer than the girl and about her own age—in the late twenties. His eyes were too round, his mouth too wide, his legs too long; yet the general effect of his appearance was pleasing, for he had the look of youth, health, high spirits, and an affable disposition. At the moment he was not being affable. Neither was the girl.
“I don’t see why we should wait any longer.”
“Don’t you?” The man’s eye followed her pencil.
“Maybe we’d better call the whole thing off.”
“Now, Pauline—” he began.
She cut him short. “I don’t like secrets—particularly secret engagements. And I don’t see any reason for it. Both our parents were delighted. Though you don’t seem to realize it, there are other men in the world. Some of them ask me out to dinner and—so forth. If they knew I were engaged to you they—well, it would make things easier all around. As it is, I’m neither engaged nor disengaged. I’m suspended in a vacuum. It’s hard to act as if you were an engaged girl when nobody knows you are. It wouldn’t matter for a short time, but it’s been going on for several months now. Honestly, Rod, I’m tired of keeping my ring in a bureau drawer and looking self-conscious whenever your name is mentioned. I can understand waiting until after the run of the play to get married, but why can’t we tell people we’re engaged?”
“Because we just can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s—well, you wouldn’t understand. You’ll just have to take it on trust that we can’t.”
“How are we ever going to get along after we’re married if you don’t trust my understanding enough to tell me things that matter so much to both of us?”
“And how are we ever going to get along if you don’t trust me at all?”
Pauline closed the sketch pad and slipped the pencil into a slot in the cover. “Rod, we can’t go on like this. We will have to call it off.”
“All right, then do!” Rod assumed an elaborate nonchalance. “May I get you a cocktail?”