7
The Wait:
Flight of the Faithful
WHEN A MAN SLEEPS IN a strange room, in a strange house, nothing familiar about him to meet his eyes when he first opens them, often he cannot remember where he is nor how he came to be there. A detective is only a man, after all. When he sleeps, he sleeps just as dead and his mind goes just as dead. So put a detective in that situation, and he’s just as likely to have it happen to him as the next man.
Shawn opened his eyes and drew a blank.
The things that always greeted him weren’t there any more. That familiar crack running down the plaster on the wall beside his bed; long and spidery, and opening up in one place in a walnut-sized abrasure to show a brief glimpse of the fill. Then wriggling some more, and finally petering out, as though it couldn’t quite make the floor. That pivot glass above the dresser, that was always slumped over at an angle and that reflected things through slantwise strokes of static black rain due to the wearing out of its quicksilver backing. And then the interlocking-window outlook, on a straight line beyond the foot of the bed. That is to say, two windows fitted one within the other with mathematical evenness. The nearer and the outer one his own; the farther and the smaller one the one facing it across the cramped shaft. There was always a bottle of milk on the ledge of it. It was always on the left-hand side of the ledge of it, never the right. It had always been opened and about one glassful taken by the time he saw it; then the rest put outside there until evening. The milk line was always at the same height, just where the neck widened into the body. If he kept his head low in his own bed and stared straight at the bottle down his chest, he could lose the base of it, make it appear to be standing on his own window ledge and not the far one. Several times, when it had been cold out and he’d hated to get up, he’d wished it were. So that he could just open the window, haul it in, and have an effortless hoist at it direct from the bottle. There was always a rumpled tawny shade down full length behind it. He’d never seen it go up, or even ripple. He didn’t know who lived there. He’d never seen anyone. Never even seen the hand that set the milk bottle out. He didn’t particularly want to.
All of this was gone. But the recollection of it still was traced on the scene around him. It was like a double exposure. The walls had receded, doubling the space around him. The windows had tripled, and they were all in the wrong places. Instead of the gray, brick-seamed pattern of the shaft, there was almost a dizzying amount of openness, you could see way out to nowhere. The strip of rag rug, that invariably skidded and bunched when he first put foot to it, had spread out all over the floor, bloomed into Persian tracery.
Even when he sat up and looked bewilderedly down at himself, he couldn’t place those broad blue and white stripes. He was dressed in pajamas, in bed! The height of time-wasting formality.
He got to the floor. Where am I? sputtered through his disconnected mind. How’d I get in here? He couldn’t find the right place to plug it in.
He went over to his clothes and anxiously fumbled for something. As though instinctively knowing the compass, the one thing, that could unerringly right him. And with the touch of the gun to his hand, it came back.
Oh—their place. I’m here to—help them. And then with a cynical twist of the mouth, Big help I’d be; can’t even remember where I’m at.
He was on the lace of his last shoe when he heard voices somewhere outside. Beyond the windows. They weren’t very near, but they carried, because it was so still around.
He went over and looked, finishing wrangling with his tie.
At the foot of the entrance walk, where the driveway stemmed it, one of McManus’s operatives was standing talking with a woman. Someone he didn’t recognize immediately; garbed and hatted as though she had just arrived. A valise stood beside them on the ground. They were arguing. Twice she reached down for it, and twice she desisted, to answer more fully something he said.
Shawn hoisted the window, looked out.
“What’s matter, Gleason?”
“She wants to go. And I’ve got no orders to let anyone through.”
“Whaddo I care what orders you’ve got!” the woman said sharply. “I’m going!”
Shawn placed her as her face came more fully his way, in the act of hoisting the valise. This time to completion. The Reids’ cook.
“Wait a minute, I’ll be right down.”
The altercation had evidently continued unabated the whole time he was on his way down the inside stairs. He opened the front door and came out on the walk in time to overhear Gleason insisting, “—nobody goes in or out, they told me.”
To which the woman rejoined with asperity. “They didn’t say out, they said in!”
“Oh, you know!” the plain-clothes man said with ponderous sarcasm. “You’re going to tell me what I was told!”
Shawn drew up before them, gave them a minute to calm down.
“Now, why? Why do you want to go?”
“Why?” she echoed scornfully. “Everyone knows.”
“Everyone knows what?” he fenced, giving the other man a quick look of mutual understanding.
“Listen, mister,” she said sturdily, “you’re not fooling anyone. I didn’t close my eyes all night long. Look at me, I’m shaking now.” She held out one hand toward him to show him. Her voice rose a little, excitedly. “I’m going to get out of here, d’you understand, out of here. I’ve got a family of my own. I’ve got a husband and two kids of my own.”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
Her voice rose still further. “Listen, mister, I’m not going to argue that with you. Even if nothing does, I still don’t want to be here when it doesn’t. Can’t you get that through your head? I just want to get away from this house, for good and for all!”
She was already in a state of semihysteria, he could see that; unanswerable to reason. “Does Miss Reid know?”
“I spoke to her on the way out just now. Now give me my valise and let me go. You can’t hold me here against my will, and neither can this other man.”
Shawn let his foot drop from it. “Those your own things in there?”
“Own!” she flamed. “I’ll open it and show you right here and now, if you want me to!” She began grappling hectically with the latches.
He fanned her back. “If I let you go,” he told her, “it’s only because I don’t want you around here acting the way you are now, frightening those two people more than they are already. I’m trying to help them, and you’re no help this way.”
He stepped back disgustedly. “All right, Gleason, let her go.”
She snatched the valise and ran down the curving driveway toward the estate entrance in the distance. She grew smaller as she ran, but the driveway was so lengthy and its curve so gradual, she seemed not to move much, simply to shrink to doll-like size while maintaining her same distance between the two points. She cast frightened backward looks from time to time as she bobbed along. Not at the two of them; up over them at the house itself.
“I never saw such a frightened skirt in my life before,” Gleason commented. “Of nothing.”
I have, thought Shawn, unspoken. Only not a girl, a man of years. And who is to say if it’s nothing, or if it’s something?
The door suddenly clipped open behind them, and the Swedish girl Signe was standing there, agitatedly tightening a wool scarf about her throat, a bulging carpetbag with double grips laced over her arm. She ignored them completely. Her eyes sought and found the distant fleeing figure.
She emitted a high-pitched wail of feared abandonment that went winging down the sloping ground after its objective. “Anna! Wait! I come too! I come with!”
They didn’t try to stop her. They parted and she went rushing through between them, as obliviously as if they were trees or stone entrance flanges like the lions farther up from them.
The first figure had halted, was hooking an arm toward her repeatedly, to spur her to even greater haste. As if even to stand still for th
at little was dangerous.
They joined. They hurried on together without a moment’s delay.
“I always knew panic was contagious,” Shawn remarked. “But this is the first time I ever saw it catch on with my own eyes.”
The figure of a man suddenly materialized at the distant driveway entrance. He hadn’t been in sight a moment before. The two women stopped before him. Gleason raised one arm high, executed a slow overhead sweep with it. The two women hurried on again, unhindered. The man wasn’t there any more. Even if you’d been looking right at him, it was impossible to tell where he’d gone to.
Shawn and Gleason turned again, simultaneously. Weeks came running out, his feet agilely taking the steps like water spilling over their edges. “—’d they go yet? —’d they leave yet?”
Gleason backed a thumb over his shoulder. “Hit it, you rat,” he said scathingly. “Maybe you can beat them out if you run fast enough.”
He skittered edgewise around them, and both their heads turned in unison, moving with him in wordless contempt as he went. He’d been engaged in cramming something into his side trouser pocket when he first emerged, and he continued as he ran by. Then in withdrawing his hand, he lost it; it fell out. A mangled check, newly received. He stopped, skidded back to it, swerved for it, crammed it in a second time, and ran on.
“And when you do that with your pay check, you’re frightened,” Gleason said. He spat offside to the grass.
They didn’t stand and follow his course to its completion, as they had the first two.
“I’m going in,” Shawn said.
She was standing there in the hall, Jean, with the remaining one of the two maids. Not a girl, this one, a sensible-looking middle aged woman. She saw him enter, but she didn’t say anything to him.
“Eight years is a long time,” she said gently. “I’m grateful to you for staying.”
The woman didn’t answer. She nodded in embarrassment, looked down at the scanty floor between them.
Shawn didn’t know whether to approach them or not. He could tell by Jean’s face that she was badly hurt by the flight of the others.
The woman turned toward the kitchen. “It’s that Anna,” she mumbled. “Before I knew it she had the others all steamed up and everything—”
“I know,” Jean murmured as the woman went out.
Shawn moved over to where she was standing, beside the library entrance.
She tried smiling.
“It hurts a little, you can’t help it. Are people always that way, when their own skins get in the way of—?”
“No,” he said, “not all.”
“She’s the only one left—she and Mrs. Hutchins,” she said wistfully. “Mrs. Hutchins would never leave me, she’d never go. She’s been like a second mother to me, ever since I was a little gi—”
They both turned at the soft sound of the slowly descending steps on the stairs. The plane of the hall ceiling beneath which they stood hid the maker until her gradually lengthening figure had descended under its level. Gray silk stockings, prim black skirt bottom, step by unwilling step. Then above, at last, the face of Mrs. Hutchins. She twisted a handkerchief she had in her hands. Shawn held his breath.
Jean turned aside to go into the library, with a deft little movement of avoidance. Not wanting to know.
Shawn caught at her hand and pressed it briefly in surreptitious consolation as she went by. Then he turned to the woman on the stairs.
“You too?” he said acidly.
“No,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I’m staying. I don’t want to, but I am. I’ve been here too long. I couldn’t leave her.”
8
Police Procedure:
Schaefer
“SCHAEFER, LIEUTENANT. I’M SORRY, SIR, but I have to report I’ve lost Eileen McGuire; you know, the Reids’ former maid.”
“You’ve lost her! What d’you mean? Didn’t I tell you to stay with her night and day, to keep her in front of you every minute of the time? Didn’t I tell all you men not to lose sight of your objectives no matter what—? How did she manage to get away from you?”
“It isn’t that, sir. I know where she is. She’s right here with me—”
“Then if she’s right there with you— Can she see you?”
“No, sir.”
“Does she know you’re tailing her?”
“Not any more, sir.”
“Then she did know, is that it?”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know if she did or not, lieutenant. You see—”
The entrance to the old-fashioned seven-story factory building was recessed, set back in an indentation from the outer building line. Though open to the street, it was roofed over by the upper part of the building itself, supported by two grubby stone columns, and offered if nothing else a windbreak from the needling little flurries of air that scampered along footloose over the sidewalk. At the back of this enclave were swing doors giving into the interior of the building, and through them could be glimpsed a shabby tiled corridor and a lattice-guarded elevator bank with the cables left exposed to view. An open platform would descend, sallow light would peer through the lattices which would be pleated aside, and sheaves of tightly bunched legs would disintegrate and obliterate the corridor flooring, swarming over it on their way out. No one was going up any more, everyone was coming down. Over the swing doors, facing outward, was a stone peristyle. Within this was set a yellowed clock face, and on this the hands were minutes away from five.
On both sides of the outer vestibule were affixed shingles in a perpendicular line of black sandpaper, bearing in gilt lettering the names of the various tenants. The third one from the bottom, on the left-hand side, was inscribed: “Art-Craft Novelty Company, Artificial Flowers.”
There were five men waiting around the shallow setback, two on one side of the way, three on the other. One of the latter, as a matter of fact, was rather more on the streetward side than within, lingering inconspicuously around the bulky turn of the supporting column, so that he was not vis-à-vis to those leaving the building. Each was intent on his own concerns; though they were at one another’s elbows at times in their shifting about, they all refrained from noticing one another. Once one asked his immediate neighbor for a light; it was given and accepted in wary taciturnity, no further amenity followed, and a moment later the two were as unaware of each other as before.
The lift reached bottom and a bunched-up knot of girls disgorged. They spread a little as the corridor offered its width, but they still came out en masse. The entryway was suddenly raucous with their strident voices.
They were all young. Few were pretty, or even passable. They were all tired-looking, sallow-faced from confinement, yet effervescently animated by their release.
The men looked at them, and they looked at the men. There wasn’t one pair of eyes among them that failed to glance with almost suctionlike propulsion at the heavy, unreceptive masculine faces. There was almost a ferocity in the glances. No second look was given, however. That was because no first look had been returned.
They dispersed. Silence fell in the entryway.
Again the five were alone. Again each one was alone, insulated from the others.
One glanced at the clock, and then a moment after spat to the ground a little to one side of where he stood. It was impossible to determine whether there was any connection between the two acts.
Again the elevator grounded. Again a knot of girls disgorged. Again they streamed out, replicas of the first. Again their eyes accosted the waiters’, primitively avid, but didn’t linger when no spark was struck.
“She’ll be down in a minute,” a high-pitched voice called out ribaldly in passing. It was impossible to determine whose. It was impossible to determine which one of the men it was addressing. Perhaps no single one, the entire five in a group.
The elevator was making faster trips now. It seemed to go up and down almost like a piston. The building was emptying.
Another group. A
girl suddenly went off at a tangent, had clipped herself to one of the men, arm through arm slack.
His eyes didn’t lose their dour inscrutability. He didn’t smile. He didn’t touch his hat.
“Do y’always have to be the last one down?”
“Who asked you to wait?”
There were four men left now. Three within the door gap, the fourth around to the outside of the entrance pilaster.
The elevator was coming incessantly now. It almost seemed to bounce; down-up, down-up, down-up.
Two girls detached themselves this time. They aimed themselves, not at two men but toward a single one. One faltered to stop a step or two short, the other possessively fastened herself to him. Their voices were brassy with the same five-o’clock excitement that possessed all.
“Is that him?”
“Yeah, that’s him. How is he?”
An introduction was pattered off with almost unintelligible haste and lack of inclination. The introducer promptly separated its two component parts almost before it could take effect, swinging out into the homeward-bound stream with her escort riveted close to her. By her own effort rather than his.
“C’mon, Sam. See you tomorrow, Helen; we go this way.”
Sam looked back over his shoulder. His eyes had a lingering quality. “Pleased to meet you. See you s’more, I hope.”
“I always get through work at five; same time every day,” was the rejoinder, delivered with alacrity.
He received a violent corrective tug that righted him on his course. “C’mon, Sam,” could be heard, in a tone of latent warning.
The discarded member of the trio remained standing where she had been left, facing their way and holding a lipstick poised absently to her lips without doing much with it. She acted as though she were waiting for some unspoken pact or understanding to be sealed.
Pink showed briefly over the man’s collar, as his face turned a second time. He looked over the opposite shoulder this time, the one farthest from his escortee.
The girl standing behind gave a slight wave of her fingers, little more than a flicker. She turned away immediately, but she was smiling. The pact had been sealed.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 19