At seven-thirty he decided to telephone Maryjane. By this time he was suffering a hundred regrets and nameless fears. Among them was a feeling of guilt for the way he had acted to his fiancee over the telephone. It was inexcusable. He had to admit it. He had been a boor and had behaved like a stupid idiot. No wonder she had been speechless with indignation.
He put the call in and then, when at last she answered, he was overcome with a sudden dumbness.
“Gerald,” he said. “This is Gerald.” And then, for some reason, he seemed utterly incapable of uttering another word.
“Where are you?”
Her voice was cold and distant.
“Home,” he said, at last. “I’m home and I just thought I would call and see if everything is all right.”
For a long moment there was no answer.
“Gerald?” Maryjane said, at last. “Gerald? What’s the matter? What’s wrong? You don’t sound right. Please tell me what is going on? I want to know.”
She was no longer angry, no longer bitter. She was perplexed, unable to understand what wTas happening.
“I’m all right,” Gerald said. “Yes, I’m all right I just wanted to call and apologize…”
“There’s something wrong. I just know that there’s something wrong,” Maryjane said. “Please tell me…”
“It’s nothing dear,” he said. “Just that I wasn’t feeling well, and… well, I just…” his voice trailed off.
“Gerald Hanna,” she said, “Gerald Hanna, you tell me this minute exactly…”
And then, once again just as it had on Saturday morning, it came over him again. He felt that peculiar feeling of cold aloofness. A sensation of almost utter distaste.
“I’m all right, I tell you.” His voice was frozen and tight. “Sorry I bothered-just wanted to tell you that everything is fine. I’ll see you next week end as usual. Good-by.”
He hung up without waiting for an answer.
Leaving the phone, he quickly crossed the room and snapped on the radio. And then he went to the kitchen and got the bottle of whiskey and poured himself a drink.
It was almost like magic. Suddenly he felt fine. Felt just as he had been feeling Saturday night. What in the hell had gotten into him anyway? What had he been stewing around about and worrying for? Everything was going just as he had planned it. Everything was fine.
All it had taken was that phone call to Maryjane to straighten him out. He’d been a fool to sit around and worry.
He downed the drink and replaced the bottle and then returned to the living room and sunk down in the big upholstered chair, He took a cigarette from a box on the table at his side and then reached over and played around with the dials on the radio set until he found a band playing calypso.
At nine o’clock the program was interrupted for five minutes of spot news. It was then that Gerald learned that police had found and identified Vince Dunne’s body.
Maryjane Swiftwater was not among the several hundred thousand persons who heard that newscast. In the first place, Maryjane never listened to either the radio or television, considering both mediums vulgar and boring. And in the second place, at the moment the announcer was telling the world about the discovery of Dunne’s body, Maryjane herself was having a completely baffling conversation over the telephone with a man who had described himself as Detective Lieutenant Hopper of the Nassau County Police Department.
The lieutenant, from what she could gather, was for some absolutely bizarre reason, interested in her engagement to Gerald Hanna, He refused to say why he was interested and his questions completely confused her.
It never occurred to Maryjane to ask if Gerald were in some sort of trouble. Gerald wasn’t the sort of person ever to be in trouble. And it couldn’t be that he had had an accident. Why she’d been talking to him herself less than half an hour or so ago. And so she was utterly bewildered.
The man wanted to know how long they’d known each other, how long they’d been engaged. He even wanted to know why Gerald had failed to keep his week-end appointment with her, although to save her life she couldn’t understand how he even knew about the appointment.
Five minutes after she had talked with the man, Maryjane made her decision.
There was just no doubt about it any longer. There was something very, very wrong. Something that she didn’t know about and couldn’t possibly understand. And so there was only one thing to do. There would be no point in calling Gerald back on the telephone. No point at all. The last two calls had been sufficiently unsatisfactory to establish that.
She would go down to New York the next day. on Monday, and see Gerald and have it out with him. If she left her job an hour early, she would have plenty of time to make the two-ten into town and it would get her to New York in time to take a cab to Penn Station from Grand Central and get out to Roslyn by the time Gerald himself returned from his office.
It would be best to see Gerald at the apartment; she didn’t want to risk having a scene in his office or in some public restaurant.
Steinberg was watching a television show at the time and so missed the news broadcast. The oversight, however, was not important; he received the word from one of his ambulance chasers within five minutes of the time the announcer signed off. Within another two minutes he had Slaughter on the phone. He knew at once that Slaughter himself was unaware of the news and he had to be very careful how he broke it to him. Steinberg worried about tapped telephone lines.
It took several minutes and a little double talk, but Slaughter was fast on the pickup and got it almost at once. He told Steinberg to hold the wire a moment and then rushed out into the restaurant.
Sue Dunne had already left. The only thing the manager knew was that she had suddenly gotten sick and said she had to go home.
Slaughter went back into his office and told Steinberg to meet him at the New York apartment as soon as possible. They both arrived within forty-five minutes and took the same elevator up to the floor on which Slaughter maintained his apartment.
“All right, Leo,” Slaughter said, the moment they were in the apartment, “let’s have it.”
“There isn’t much,” the attorney said. “Maxie said the cops are playing it cagey. But this he does know. Dunne turned up out on the Island, north of Roslyn. Some kid found the body lying in the bushes. Shot. Maxie got there only a minute or two after the cops showed up. Vince didn’t have the stuff on him.”
Slaughter cursed.
“How does he know?” he asked. “Maybe the law…”
Steinberg raised a protesting hand.
“Maxie knows,” he said. “Hell, they didn’t even know it was Vince at first. Maxie was there when the identification was made and he got a verification from a pal at headquarters. No-there were no jewels. Nothing. Looked like the kid got shot and tossed out of a car. At least that rounds that up. We know what happened to him.”
“We don’t know,” Slaughter said. “We don’t know nothing. All we know is about Vince and Jake and Dommie. There has to be someone else; someone we don’t know nothing about. And there has to be the stuff. We know they got the stuff outta the jewelry store all right.”
Steinberg stood up and stretched.
“Listen Fred,” he said, “maybe you better forget about that part of it. The boys are taken care of-they’re dead. The jewels are missing. Right now, they are about the hottest things this side of hell. Don’t forget, two cops died during that rhubarb. Maybe it would be better to just write the whole caper off and stay in the clear while you’re still clean.”
Slaughter looked hard at the little lawyer and then slowly shook his head.