by Jerry eBooks
The night of the murder, Mr. Weiss knocked at the door of Mary Russell’s room just as the Alka-Ves show came in on the radio.
Mr. Weiss was the landlady’s husband, a small unimportant person with sandy, fly-away hair and a worn toothbrush of a mustache. It was always Mrs. Weiss who showed the rooms and collected the rent. But if there was a complaint to be voiced Mr. Weiss became Charley McCarthy for his spouse.
Mary Russell, one hand on the door and the other clutching at the neck of her blue chenille robe, looked into Mr. Weiss’ eyes without discovering whether they were pale blue or gray. Her mind took a breathless backward plunge and recalled that her room rent was not yet due, thank heaven!
Mr. Weiss’ eyes passed quickly from Mary and to Mary’s radio.
“It’s bothering Mrs. Weiss,” he said with some show of indignation. He was always pointing at something or someone with his eyes, preferring pronouns to nouns.
Mary went back to the somber oak table that, in Mrs. Weiss’ estimation at least, gave the bedroom the qualities of a living room. The radio was on this table. Mary turned the volume down and faced Mr. Weiss again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly feeling more sympathy for Mrs. Weiss who was sick than she did for herself. Indigestion was probably worse than unemployment. “Is Mrs. Weiss feeling badly tonight?”
Mr. Weiss showed the palms of his hands in a weary gesture; married to a hypochondriac as he was, he must have had to answer that question a tiresome number of times.
Mary burned her notes carefully and completely.
“Her indigestion again,” he said. And then his strange little eyes scampered away from Mary and back to the radio. “Maybe that’s too loud, even.” He indicated the south wall of the room. “They’re like paper.”
He meant the walls, of course. Mary’s room and the one occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Weiss were connected by a narrow bath that had been sandwiched into the old house as an afterthought. There was nothing soundproof about the cheap partition.
Mary snapped the radio off entirely and faced Mr. Weiss with thinning lips. He backed, closing her door. His head ducked several times—to express his thanks, no doubt, though Mary was reminded of a greedy rooster pecking at grain.
As soon as Mr. Weiss had fled, Mary clicked on the radio and turned up the volume a little way. She was in time to catch a spatter of applause the Alka-Ves comedian had just received, undeservedly, in Mary’s opinion. As for the product of the sponsor, there were three unopened bottles of Alka-Ves in the top drawer of her monstrosity of a dresser. Alka-Ves was indicated for headaches, indigestion, and overindulgence—symptoms which never bothered her in the least.
“Especially overindulgence,” she thought wryly. After eight weeks of unemployment there was practically nothing left with which to buy even a fraction of a hangover.
She had no use for Alka-Ves, yet felt no guilt about writing twenty-five perjured words, on the backs of each of the three cartons, about “Why I like Alka-Ves.” Which only goes to show to what low level an unemployed proofreader will stoop when the lure amounts to ten thousand dollars in cash prizes.
Winners of the contest were to be announced on tonight’s program, and not even Mrs. Weiss’ indigestion was going to prevent Mary from knowing whether or not her name was listed among the fortunate.
On tiptoe, she detoured the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. The chair was inviting looking with its floral print slip cover which concealed viciously barbed broken springs. Mrs. Weiss had called it “a right comfortable easy chair,” and if you gave Mrs. Weiss the benefit of the doubt the only possible conclusion was that she actually enjoyed suffering.
The Alka-Ves comedian addressed the mike to crack wise about the title of the next musical number. It was about that time that the lights went out, and the sudden darkness and silence in Mary’s room made her sit bolt upright on the edge of the bed.
“Oh well,” she thought, “they’ll be on in a minute.”
But then possibly a minute passed and the lights were not on. The great old house was becoming restless. Other lodgers in the hall outside were talking—talking in whispers imposed by darkness. Mr. Griffin, who lived three doors down and frequently remarked that he owed his success as a brush salesman to his voice, inquired loudly if this was a blackout.
Mary got up, went to the window, looked out across the alley. Houses on Wilson Street had lighted windows. She crossed to the door, opened it, stepped out into the hall to bump squarely into a round, rubbery figure.
“Oomp!” half squeal, half grunt.
“Mrs. Weiss!” Mary dropped her hands on rounded shoulders covered with the flannel of a dressing gown. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Weiss.”
“Oh, it’s you, dearie,” Mrs. Weiss said, gasping. “My, what a start you give me and my heart cuttin’ up fit to kill.”
“I’m sorry,” Mary repeated. “My lights went out and I came out to see if they were out all over the house.”
“Well, I guess! It’s the electric company, most likely. A body pays for service and what do you get, I ask you? You pay and pay plenty, and what happens?”
“You don’t pay when the lights are out,” Mary assured her.
“Well maybe you just think you don’t,” Mrs. Weiss said. “Don’t think they don’t pad your bill up anyway. Oh, I know a thing or two about electric companies. I haven’t kept house all these years for nothing.”
Mary told Mrs. Weiss that the houses on Wilson Street were lighted, and Mrs. Weiss shuffled back into her own room to verify this and Mary followed.
“Well, so they are!” Mrs. Weiss said, alarmed. “All up and down Wilson Street. You don’t suppose it’s us, do you?”
“Maybe just a fuse,” Mary said consolingly. Mrs. Weiss came back from the window and breathed heavily near Mary. “My, I hope it ain’t something that costs. Probably take all my rents for two months back paying for it. Like I always say, it ain’t the cost so much as the upkeep.”
“Where’s Mr. Weiss?” Mary asked.
“Went to get me some new medicine,” Mrs. Weiss said. “He would be out a time like this. That’s the way with men. Always under your feet when they’re no good to you and not around when you need ’em.”
Mary thought, “Some men are nice.” Especially that Johnny Straus who had the front room at Mrs. Weiss’.
“Oh, you’ll find out,” Mrs. Weiss clattered on in the dark. “You can’t tell a young girl. Might as well save your breath, but they find out.”
Mrs. Weiss had maneuvered herself between Mary and the door. She put a hand on Mary’s arm and the sheep-dog smell of her bathrobe was particularly evident.
“Tell you what you do if you want, dearie. You come over here to the easy chair and set a piece with me till Weiss or the lights come back. I don’t like the dark, especially with my heart cuttin’ up fit to kill like now.”
Mary allowed herself to be guided into a chair. She sat down on a cushion that had all the promontories of a relief map of the Rocky Mountains. Mrs. Weiss sat down in the rocker which Mary had often heard creaking at late hours of the night. She brought up the subject of Mrs. Weiss’ health—a topic which would require only an occasional sympathetic “ah” on her part. She wondered if the electricity would come on in time for her to hear the announcement of the winners of the Alka-Ves contest.
“It’s gas,” Mrs. Weiss was saying. “Pressing up around my heart so I can’t get my wind, which is why I got to sit up straight like this. You got no idea what I suffer. The agony of it! People don’t really know how lucky they are until they get sick, I always say.”
And so on, until after a while Mary thought it was time she said something.
“I’m sorry my radio bothered you, Mrs. Weiss.”
“Why, it don’t,” Mrs. Weiss said. “In fact, as I said to Weiss tonight, ‘Don’t Miss Russell’s radio sound real cheery?’ I said that to Weiss. You know you can hear it right through the wall. I often thought I should get me one of them bedroom ra
dios, ailing a lot like I do. But then you came along and took that room and you had a radio . . .” Mary wondered if Mrs. Weiss was lying or whether the radio had actually annoyed Mr. Weiss. She fully intended to ask Mrs. Weiss if she hadn’t asked Mr. Weiss to tell Mary to turn the radio down. But then the lights came on all over the house.
“They’re on again,” Mrs. Weiss said unnecessarily. “Maybe it was a fuse. Maybe Mr. Griffin fixed it. My, but it’s nice to see again!”
Mrs. Weiss stood up, puffing. She was a round-shouldered, big-hipped woman, shapeless in the gray bathrobe she wore. There were hard lines around her eyes and mouth—hard in spite of a certain pouchiness. Carelessness had given a yellow tarnish to her silver hair. She put a hand on Mary’s arm.
“It was right nice for you to come in and talk with an old lady, Miss Russell. Maybe someday, when you’re old and ailin’, somebody will come in and sit a spell with you. And then you’ll know just how nice.”
Mary thought, “Heaven forbid!” When she went out the door she saw Mr. Weiss returning, his hat on and wearing a dirty leather jacket. He had a bottle of Alka-Ves in his left hand. As he ducked his head at Mary she noticed a greasy black cobweb trailing from the crown of his hat.
In her own room she found the radio playing again. But the Alka-Ves program was over. She switched the set off, flung herself on the bed, and argued herself out of crying. She never had built up any real hopes about winning the contest. Except for maybe one of the twenty-five dollar prizes. Twenty-five dollars would have come in pretty handy right now, kept her floating until she found another job or decided what to do about Johnny Straus.
Johnny had asked her to marry him; had asked her presumptuously the fourth evening they had been out together. And she’d told him that he didn’t know her well enough yet. Johnny was a cop—not that that had anything to do with her saying yes or no. What mattered most was that Johnny Straus was a square-shooter. To be fair with herself she had to be fair with Johnny, too. And it didn’t seem fair to allow her shrunken savings to influence her decision. No, not until after she had a job would she give serious consideration to Johnny; she’d be sure then that it was love and not miss-meal cramps.
For a long time she lay there on the bed, ankles crossed, hands clasped beneath her head. She always waited for Mr. and Mrs. Weiss to get through with the bathroom before she prepared for bed. But when eleven o’clock rolled around and she still had not heard the creak of the bathroom door nor the thump of the cranky faucets, she decided she was being too considerate. She got up, equipped herself with towel and toothbrush, started for the door.
Sounds came out of the Weiss room. First it was Mrs. Weiss’ voice, stretched thin and gasping:
“Weiss. Weiss, where are you? What’ve you done?”
And then Mr. Weiss’ voice, a hushing whisper without intelligible words.
Mary stood at her door, one hand on the knob, listening at the sounds through the wall.
“Weiss! It’s poison!”
And from the unexpected source of meek little Mr. Weiss himself came a short, sharp oath. Then: “Shut up!”
Someone fell to the floor. The Weiss door opened and Mary turned the knob of her own door and peeked out into the hall. Mr. Weiss was out there in a gray and pink striped night shirt, his arms stabbing at the sleeves of a bathrobe, his hair standing on end, eyes bright with fear.
“You’ll be all right,” he was saying. “I’ll get Doc Crowell.”
He pattered down the hall, still lunging at the armholes of his robe. Lottie Swain, the beautician who had the middle room, put her head out of her door and asked what the trouble was. “Her indigestion,” Mr. Weiss said, going down the steps. Lottie Swain, in cold cream and curlers, started toward the Weiss room. And then came Mr. Griffin, asking what was up. “Mis’ Weiss,” Lottie said, and she was the first to enter Mrs. Weiss’ room. Mr. Griffin followed Lottie Swain, and then Mary.
“Oh, poor Mis’ Weiss!”
Mrs. Weiss, gray, shapeless, inert, lay upon the floor beside her rocking chair. Lottie Swain and Mr. Griffin got down on their knees and tried to lift her. They tried twice independently and then once together, held her between them, with Mrs. Weiss’ short arms dangling forward. And it was some time before Lottie Swain asked: “Is she—?” Mr. Griffin, his left hand flat against Mrs. Weiss’ breast, said gravely: “I’m afraid so.”
Mary stood near the door, trembling, trying not to look at Mrs. Weiss. On the table beside the rocker was a bottle of Alka-Ves, one tablet removed. Nothing more on the table—just the bottle.
Mr. Weiss bounded up the steps, ran down the hall to burst into the room. He asked: “How is she?” Lottie Swain looked at him and shook her head. Mr. Griffin looked at him and shook his head. Mary looked at him and saw, in this frightened little man who was wringing his hands and blubbering, something that was inexplicably horrible.
Mary went to her room. Through the wall she heard Dr. Crowell’s arrival. Breathlessly she listened to the quiet movements in the next room—background for the nervous sobs of Lottie Swain. Then Mr. Weiss explained how his wife had been troubled with indigestion all evening; how he had given her an Alka-Ves tablet. Then Dr. Crowell’s consoling words came distinctly through the wall:
“Yes,” Mr. Weiss said hoarsely. “Yes, you told me, Doc. But then a person can’t prepare himself for a shock like this. You keep hoping it will be years yet.”
After Dr. Crowell came the quiet bustle of the mortician’s men. While they were busy in the next room, Mary slipped out into the hall, ran downstairs, back through the kitchen, and down into the basement. There in the yellow lighted gloom, she tiptoed across the floor, crackling coal dust beneath her slippers. She went to the main electric switch on the wall beside the steam boiler, looked into the switch box. Hanging from the rafters and pipes above were festooned cobwebs, greasy-black with soot.
“Mis’ Weiss died from chronic myocardsomething,” Lottie Swain told Mary when they met in the front hall. “That means her heart. And the contributing cause Dr. Crowell wrote down was acute indigestion. Makes you wonder a person can’t be too careful what they put in their stomick.”
“Myocarditis,” Mary thought, as she got away from Lottie, “and the contributing cause was—was murder!”
She wished she could talk to Johnny Straus about it, but there was no opportunity until the following night when Johnny came off duty and suddenly dated her for supper. Out of uniform, Johnny reminded her of a cherub with hair on its chest. He had a round, pink face, a mere button of a nose, eyes so innocently blue as to make Mary forget that he was presumptuous and even downright insulting at times. With a short, squareshouldered body like that a double-breasted tweed jacket was the last thing he should have worn, but his blue eyes gained him forgiveness for that, as well.
Mary related her story over the restaurant table. Johnny listened in a preoccupied manner, and when she had to stop for breath he shook a fork at her.
“Now, kitten,” he said. “Now, kitten, just because you’re going to marry a cop don’t get notions you’ve got undiscovered detective ability like Myrna Loy in the Thin Man pictures.”
“I haven’t any notions, and I’m not going to marry a cop!” she retorted. “Anyway, I haven’t said so.”
He grinned. “Then let’s eat.”
“But he killed her, Johnny. I know he did.”
“Who?” Johnny attacked his steak.
“Mr. Weiss. Who do you think I’ve been talking about?”
“Oh, no,” Johnny said. He chewed a while. “Do you know who Mr. Weiss is?”
“Well, he’s no G-man!”
“No. He’s little Mr. Public,” Johnny said gravely. “That’s who I always think of when I see him. Mr. Public. In the cartoons you know the little guy who wears the derby, is burdened with taxes, never gets any attention except at election time? That’s Mr. Public. That’s Mr. Weiss, too.”
“He looks like that,” she admitted. “But just the same he murdered his wi
fe.”
“With an Alka-Ves tablet?”
“With an Alka-Ves tablet which he didn’t dissolve in water. Don’t you see, Johnny, he gave her the tablet dry. All that chemical reaction, that ordinarily takes place when the tablet is dropped in water, took place in Mrs. Weiss’ stomach. That created pressure on her heart which resulted in her death. It’s happened before. I read in the paper where somebody accidentally took one of those tablets without dissolving it, and that person died, too. There’s a caution printed right on the label to the effect that the tablet must be in solution.”
“How do you know he didn’t give it to her in water?” Johnny asked.
“Because there wasn’t any water in the room. And to get water out of the bathroom, Mr. Weiss would have had to turn on a faucet. I know he didn’t turn on any faucet, because you can’t touch the faucets in that bathroom without making the pipes thump and knock. And I was listening for the noise the faucets make, because that would tell me when Mr. and Mrs. Weiss were through with the bathroom.”
Johnny didn’t say anything. He just went on eating, not visibly impressed by all her deductions.
“There are other reasons why I know Mr. Weiss deliberately gave his wife a dry tablet. The dosage and administration instructions had been cut off the label of that bottle of Alka-Ves which I saw in the room!”
Johnny snorted. “Maybe he entered that get-rich-quick slogan contest—the same one you entered. That’s probably why he tore off the label. Come to think of it, maybe you’re trying to pin murder on him to eliminate him from the competition.”
Mary didn’t think that was funny. “And besides, it’s the carton you send in with your contest entry—not the label. No, he cut off that portion of the label so that Mrs. Weiss wouldn’t know the tablet was supposed to be dissolved in water.
“And why else did Mr. Weiss want me to turn my radio down? I was listening to the Alka-Ves show and you know how the announcer always tells you to dissolve the tablets in water. It was Mr. Weiss who wanted the radio silenced—not his wife. She told me she liked to hear it. And when I wouldn’t turn the radio off entirely, Mr. Weiss went down the basement and turned off the electric switch. He was supposed to have gone to the drugstore for the Alka-Ves, but he really went down into the basement. You don’t get greasy cobwebs on your hat doing to the drugstore.”