Funny that the doctor had never known anything about the man’s personal life, although he had been treating the two of them for seven years. No pictures on his desk that might be indicative, no wife or children squinting or smiling imbecilically at the degrees framed on the wall opposite.
Perhaps she was having an affair with the doctor then as well. This was not impossible. She was a passionate woman for whom he had had little time for many years. Pressures of business. Building the firm. Acquiring securities. There might have been quite a few.
Robinson’s problem, in fact, might not have been the end of the affair but the discovery that he was merely another in a procession. Robinson had vanity over his insecurity. This would have been unbearable to him. Looked at in that way the situation creates sympathy for Robinson as well. Tragic he thinks. All of it was tragic: missed circumstances, lapsed opportunities, an exercise in misdirection. No time to take the long view however or to want to go back. It is too late for this.
Procedures. Stick to the modus operandi as he has seen it established. First, the call to the inspector to clear himself. Then the meeting with the inspector to give the details, the abandonment of charges, the hunt for the true murderer, Robinson.
He thinks he knows how the man can be found. In Italy or New York Robinson’s habits are still as naked to him as only those of a lifelong business partner can be. It is not for nothing that they have worked together, shared his wife.
At last, soon or late, in the presence of the police or alone he will come face to face with the man, possibly in some dismal hotel room just like this one. Staggering against the walls, sweating, coughing, mumbling, choking, Robinson may look very much as he has over these weeks. He will feel sympathy for the man as only one who has shared these circumstances could.
“I forgive you,” he will say, reaching forward to touch Robinson. “I’m sorry, it was not merely your fault but mine too. I relieve you of your guilt. All right, it is all right,” and will connect then, a springing clasp, wrist to wrist and Robinson will disintegrate before him, weeping.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he will say, “I had no choice. It was just that I was so frightened,” and will cast him a look so full of pleading and mercy that it will contain all the vengeance he ever needed. As for the rest of it, the arrest, arraignment, trial, incarceration, he will play no role. He will let the authorities do as they will for the urge for vengeance will be out of him. Will anyone understand this?
Passion and loss. That was what it was. He can surely make this clear to the inspector, who is himself an understanding man who in his business must have seen many interesting cases like this. He and the inspector someday will share those reminiscences in a cocktail lounge or at a good restaurant on the East Side. He and the inspector. His salvation and his friend.
He picks up the phone, knowing the number so well that he could, if a blind man, find it expertly. He dials the number.
Finally, as a suddenness, all of it falls into place for him. The doctor. All of the time it would have had to have been the doctor.
Yes, yes! The man must have known his wife well. It had been seven years after all. He had treated her, understood from the confidences she would have given that she was lonely and abandoned, resentful of the way his original interest in her had fragmented into a hundred other meaningless concerns.
The doctor, hearing all of this on late afternoons in the gray of the empty office, must have taken all of these for signals instead of desperate secrets and tried to interest her in having an affair with him — when suddenly, stunningly, she turned on him in revulsion and then laughed at his desires. How well he knew this; she was exactly that kind of a woman.
“Where did you ever get that idea?” his wife must have said. “Just because I told you a few things did you think it meant that I would go to bed with you? I wouldn’t touch you, you foul little man. Hire a good-looking nurse and try it on her.”
“No,” the doctor would have said, “you can’t say this to me. You cannot. There must be some reason—”
“I’ll say anything I want,” his wife would have answered, “I’m paying the bills. You don’t even exist in my life if I don’t want you to. Where could you have gotten the idea I would touch you?” She had that streak; it would have been what she said. And the doctor, a simple man enthralled by his desires, would have been unable to deal with it.
So, he had killed her. After saying what she did, his wife must have turned to leave the office, but before she could even reach the door the doctor had, in a fit of passion, ended her life. With a scalpel or hypodermic injection or whatever else doctors kept in their examining rooms.
They weren’t regulated, that was the trouble. An M.D. could get away with anything, once you had that degree on the wall. But it did not guarantee that you could have sex with your patients.
That was the point at which he had gone wrong. It would have been a clean wound — he knew his business, after all — with very little bleeding and after that with crazed skill the doctor would have disposed of the weapon and erased all signs of his own implication in the crime.
Had she died immediately? Or had she hung on, gasping on the floor for a few moments, her eyes slowly gazing as she stared at the fluorescence? Well, no need to be too graphic, he will think of that some other time. He wants to think that it was a clean, quick death; even for her cruelty she should not have suffered.
The securities then. With the woman lying at last dead before him the doctor’s passion would have turned to panic and then at last to mad cunning as the thought came to him that without witnesses and with the fact of a sterile marriage there would be an available suspect.
If he could plant the securities near the body then the investigation would inevitably turn away from him, despite the fact that it was his office, and toward the husband with whose fate those securities were inextricably linked.
The doctor would not even have to worry about getting the corpse from the office; it would be credible that the husband would want to kill her in surroundings where someone else would be implicated.
Double reverse. Sitting in the hotel room he nods slowly, being able to appreciate, as he thinks the thing through, the doctor’s cunning all the way down the line.
So the doctor had done it then. There was plenty of information from the wife over seven years and he knew exactly where to look. He had seized the securities, placed them on top of the corpse and then closed up his office, knowing that all of this would shortly be found by the authorities who would make the connections.
The trap had sprung well. If he had not finally had the alertness and good sense to consider the issue of the doctor, the man without whom, damningly, the crime could not have worked, he would never have gotten out. But finally, through his own thought and effort, the crime has been solved.
If he can get the facts to the right people in time.
Robinson first. He must call Robinson and give him the explanation slowly, carefully, just the way he has worked it out.
His business partner is a ponderous man; he must take time to explain and not confuse him by hurrying. Still, he knows that he can be counted on: if it were not for Robinson smuggling him away from home at the critical moment and into this dismal but safe hotel room he would at this moment be in a cell, awaiting trial and conviction.
Still, he thinks, Robinson could have shown better taste in hotels; even at this level there must be a better place and the drug traffic is incessant.
But his partner and friend of almost a quarter-century, the only man he could ever trust, had stood by him as none of the others would, not even the inspector. Robinson insisted steadfastly that he was innocent, that he never could have done it. And had bought just enough time from the inspector to put him, for the moment, out of their grasp.