IT WAS ODDLY COMFORTING to contemplate other men’s destinies when you fairly well knew your own. The plane could go down in a crash of course. Mather wondered briefly if in such a case his notebook were recovered from the wreckage what the investigators would make of it. They always looked for sabotage, the planted bomb, the suicide proposing to take with him the plane’s full complement. A small item in the Chicago paper he was still holding in his hand by the time the plane was soaring over the Allegheny Mountains told of the burial at Moncton Grove of Peter Bradley’s ashes, while the New York police were still investigating the circumstances of his murder.
This being the early flight, his companions were mostly business men, starting their day soon after the opening of the offices of their New York conferees. Their Chicago suburb families would expect them home for dinner, the children waiting up … He had always been fond of children: with them he was—what he was, their make-believe his perfect dish. He wondered then what Janet’s child was like and why there had been no others.
Moving through the terminal to the limousine he picked up a copy of the morning Times. On the second page he saw the likeness of Jerry, the police artist’s re-creation from his description. It was remarkably good, he thought. But thinking about Jerry now, he regretted having given the description, its appearance in the papers. Until now Jerry would have felt secure. He would have supposed Eric Mather sealed within the conspiracy, doubly sealed by Bradley’s death. Now he would not know how much Mather had told the police, how much he had been able to tell the police. Jerry might be on the run.
The limousine was bound in by the morning traffic, the whole of it oozing forward like a log-jam on a river, the people within the cars and buses as helpless as woodworms. What an insignificant thing a man was truly.
He forced himself to read the Times story adjacent to the picture. Inspector Joseph Fitzgerald was a garrulous Irishman, a master at saying nothing with an air of profundity. His intent seemed to be to create the impression that the police were not telling all they knew. One might hope to God that this were so, Mather thought. He turned to the page where the story was continued. At the bottom of the column he read: “Professor Eric Mather, missing from his home for twenty-four hours …” And there, maddeningly, the story was suspended, cut off mid-sentence by the compositor at the column’s end and continued nowhere.
But the possibilities were not numerous. He could himself finish the sentence easily: “… is being sought for questioning.” He wondered if Jerry would put it together that way too.
If the police were actually looking for him, however, Mather felt that he dared not go home. They might take him into custody. He would have to tell them what he knew; he would want to. It was all written in the notebook he carried now in the valise along with his overnight things, all—up to this minute. But it was not enough by which to measure anything but ignominy.
He went directly to the University. Here too they would be alerted for him possibly. But he had promised his chairman to return in time for the afternoon classes: a little time of grace might still be left him if he hurried.
Mather entered the General Studies Building by the side door, opposite the park. Two girls were talking with the door attendant, and none of them knew him by sight. A better place for anonymity than a city university would be hard to find. Now he had to take the chance of charming a giddy girl who, he knew, would recognize him. He had tried to remember her name. He had had to leave a blank in his “Confession” though he could see her vividly in memory, pawing her face, wagging her wild red head while he had spouted Byron in the tavern. Then suddenly, opening the door to the Records Office, he had it: Sally. Sally in Our Alley …
He was not sure that it was the same girl now sitting at the desk until she looked up and recognized him. She opened her mouth, but closed it again without saying his name when he put his finger to his lips. An older woman turned from the files where she was working. Mather smiled and bowed a little toward her. With a curt nod she returned to her work and Sally came to the railing, asking loudly: “Can I help you?”
Close to him she said, scarcely above a whisper: “Mr. Mather, the police …”
He deliberately became off-hand. The girl was far too eager to conspire with him. “I’m trying to help them—in a certain matter,” he said.
“Oh.” She was disappointed.
“Sally, the boy who introduced us, Osterman?” She nodded, pleased now by the language of togetherness. “Do you see him still?”
“I don’t go out with him if that’s what you mean. Actually, it’s vice versa since that night—you know? I told you I worked in the Records Office?” Vaguely Mather remembered it now, but he had dug it sharply out of his memory needing to remember Osterman. “Common, you know. Unclean.” Sally made a face saying it that in his present disposition and relieved of this pressure he would have cherished: the girl who, for all her phony aspirations, could say that of herself. “And I thought we had a future. I do love the name Jeffrey …”
“Sally …”
“Sh …” She rolled her eyes toward the other clerk. “That’s Miss Katz. Gee, I wish I could help you, Mr. Mather.”
“Could you find Osterman for me now? I must know where he is, whatever class he’s in. I must talk to him.”
“Gee …” Sally said again, once more casting the backward glance toward Miss Katz who was now banging the file drawers, opening and closing one, then another.
“He’s an English major,” Mather prompted.
Sally drew a deep breath and called out: “I’m going out for coffee, Miss Katz. Okay?” She was on her way, Mather opening the gate for her before the woman could make up her mind what to say.
In the hallway Mather said: “I’ll watch for you here.”
“Do you want me to tell him …?”
“Nothing. Don’t even speak to him. Just come back and tell me where he is.”
Mather spent ten minutes in a booth of the men’s room halfway down the corridor. He was not a bathroom reader, but the time was interminable, the confinement with such literary examples of the college-educated as were to be read on the wall, nauseating. He took Carlyle’s Hero Worship from his bag and read a few paragraphs. Legs came and went. He heard an occasional monosyllabic greeting at the washbasins. Then the bell rang for the change of classes. He looked at his watch. It was five minutes to eleven.
On his first trip back to the Records Office, Sally had not returned. The second trip he came out in time to catch up with her in the hallway before she reached her office.
“He just went into study hall—room 408. I waited, you see, to find out where he’d go at the change of classes.”
“Bless you, Sally, you are intelligent and a princess.”
“I won’t tell anyone I saw you, Mr. Mather. But it said in the paper this morning that the police were looking for you.”
Mather wanted to go quickly. The hall was by no means deserted. But the girl put her hand on his arm to delay him, and when he stayed, she removed it quickly. “I’ve been thinking whether I ought to tell you. You know that picture of the man in The Times this morning?” Mather nodded. “I think I saw him once. Only I thought he was an F.B.I. man. He came in and asked for me, and then he wanted to see your record.”
“I know,” Mather said.
“But the thing I wanted to tell you—the reason I remembered him—it’s two or three months ago, you see—but the man that was with him, his partner?”
Mather said: “A tall handsome young man …”
Sally nodded. “I saw him with Jeffrey Osterman. I was kind of following after Jeffrey in the park. He sat down and I was going to walk by him, you know, casual? But that man came up and put his arm around Jeffrey so naturally I went the other way.”