the short steep hill. Its back was toward Cristie. It was facing the East River Drive below. It was Steven’s gray convertible.
Mrs. Hazard got in and switched on the lights. They did little more than make the darkness visible. There was no sign of Steven. Get as near as possible to the apartment, Cristie thought, so as to catch him when he arrived.
The mouth of the steep side street was almost directly in front of her on the far side of Franklin Place. The car with Sara Hazard in it was some fifty feet from the corner. Cristie started across. The roadbed was smooth, even. She was in the middle of it when she jolted to a stop. There was movement in front of her, in and around the gray coupe.
Cristie’s knee twisted under her and she almost fell. She recovered herself, stumbled over the curb, collided with a stanchion. She was oblivious, ducked around it and raced on, fighting for breath.
Less than thirty seconds later she stood motionless at the top of the hill. Her senses reeled crazily. The red tail light of the gray convertible, Steven’s car with Sara Hazard at the wheel, was plunging down the precipitous grade and weaving from side to side.
A flash across the darkness beyond and below. The gray convertible hurtled out of the side street at a terrific rate of speed. It shot straight across the Drive, struck the iron railing on the far side, crumpled it like so much papier-mâché, sawed into the air, and dropped like a stone into the swirling waters of the black East River.
Chapter Five
FILE ON SARA HAZARD
GEORGE MORRIS, a paper salesman of Pelham, New York, was an eye witness of what took place. He gave the police an accurate account of it later. Morris was proceeding north along the East River Drive after a somewhat hilarious night at Barney Gallant’s when the accident happened. Conscious that he wasn’t in the best possible shape, Morris was driving slowly, a fact for which he was to thank his lucky stars forever after. Otherwise he would have been a gone goose.
The gray convertible with a woman in it cut directly across his path less than ten feet away. The crash, the leap into the air, the sickening dive, jarred every tooth in Morris’s head.
He managed to bring his own car to a stop. He was shaking. Sweat covered him from head to foot. He wasn’t the only one who raced for that jagged gap in the iron railing above the river. Running feet pounded the pavement, there were shouts, cries. They gathered volume. There! Where? The fence. God—look!
A few minutes earlier the Drive had been deserted. People began springing up out of the darkness. A policeman arrived. A radio car appeared. The crowd thickened. Someone must have telephoned because an ambulance pulled up in short order just after the police emergency squad rolled up and took over.
The throng of spectators, dense by this time, was ordered back. A space was cleared. A wrecking truck eased its way to the broken fence above the river. Spotlights were trained on the sluggish black water. Two or three big policemen, stripping hastily, had already dived in. They were swimming around in circles and calling to each other.
The crane with chains suspended from it went down slowly. They had to try twice before the men in the water could dive down and fasten the chains securely round the car lying in the mud eighteen feet below. When it was almost up, the car slipped. A groan went up from the crowd. The whole process had to be repeated.
Pale light that was the precursor of dawn was coming up in the east when the hood of the submerged car at last broke the surface. Voices were raised. Someone moaned. The gray convertible belonging to Steven Hazard had gone into the river with a woman at the wheel. There was no woman in it now.
The car was empty.
Sara Hazard’s gloves, her purse, her keys were in the tangled wreckage of the car that had been fished up out of the East River. Her body wasn’t recovered for twenty-two days.
They were twenty-two days of unmitigated hell for Steven Hazard. Interviews with the police, with the searchers, with the detectives of the Missing Persons Bureau; it was the uncertainty that was the worst. August went by and September came and the days mounted into weeks. There was no news of any kind. Where Sara Hazard had been there was simply a void.
Steven Hazard’s friends rallied around him, did what they could, Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon, Pat Somers, his chief in the office and two or three others. He saw Cristie only once during that terrible interval. They met like strangers.
Steven showed no desire to be alone with Cristie. He was silent, remote, wrapped in a shroud of doubt and fear and torturing suspense. The South American trip was off. National Motors had sent another man to the Argentine.
For once anticipation of the dreadful ordeal that lay somewhere ahead lagged behind actuality when it finally came.
Sara Hazard’s body was discovered floating in the waters off the North Beach airport by the boat patroling the sea-plane lanes. It was taken to the morgue and subjected to extensive examination and various tests. Steven Hazard was summoned. The clothes had already been identified as the missing woman’s, black silk suit, underwear with her monogram on it. Toeless sandals still clasped the once pretty feet, now shapeless and swollen. The hat was gone and the hair that had been bright gold was no longer bright. It was bleached and stained and bedraggled from long immersion in the shifting tides of the river.
The brown eyes were mercifully closed. But the body itself was a bloated and hideous caricature of the beautiful Sara Hazard. Not nice, not easy to take.
Steven Hazard looked at her under the watchful gaze of a group of officials. Assistant District Attorney Dorrens said, “You must allow for—certain differences. The—er—water, you know, and the length of time . . .”
Steven Hazard said, “Yes.” The captain of the detective district raised an eyelid carefully. He indicated the clothing, the hair, what was left of the teeth, a bracelet embedded in the flesh. Hazard stood beside the drawer looking down. An iron rein held his emotion, his outraged sensibilities in check. He identified the body.
After a long moment he said huskily, “Yes. That’s—my wife. That’s—Sara.” He turned away.
An autopsy was duly performed. Sara Hazard had been neither shot, strangled, poisoned nor stabbed. The lungs were full of water. She had been alive when she went into the river. She had been drowned as a result of the crash.
What had happened was clear. A late party, a projected excursion elsewhere. The Hazard convertible with the top down had been parked in its usual place when it wasn’t in the garage, at the top of the sharply inclined street around the corner from the apartment hotel. Sara Hazard had lost control. The car had turned over when it hit the fence before diving into the river. She had fallen out, to be battered back and forth for all those days in the swiftly moving currents until her body turned up off the airport.
It was on the twenty-fifth of August that the fatal crash occurred. It was on September sixteenth that the body was found. Two days later Sara Hazard’s body was buried in the little cemetery a couple of miles away from the Hazard farmhouse in lower Dutchess County. A cold September rain beat down on the handful of mourners. Cristie Lansing wasn’t there. Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon were, and Pat and Cliff Somers and Steven’s chief.
That was on Wednesday. On the succeeding Monday, Steven Hazard returned to the office. Work was good for him, took him out of himself. His friends encouraged him. He began to look more normal. He went to the World’s Series with Pat, spent an occasional evening at the Dodd house. Mary Dodd was very kind to him, very gentle. So was Kit Blaketon.
Steven was too much wrapped up in himself to notice the change in Kit or that Cliff Somers no longer dropped in at all hours. Mary didn’t say anything. She talked of his work, of the future, made him talk.
Steven had closed the apartment on Franklin Place. He put the things in storage and moved to his club. He called Cristie once or twice, but it wasn’t until after the first of October when a refreshing tingle of frost was turning the leaves, that he began seeing her regularly again. The first meeting was awkward, they were stiff and shy with each other.