Cliff took out his cigarettes again and prodded into the warped pack. He threw it at me, and looked at me and smiled. “Have another smoke, kid,” he said. “I’ve only got one left, but you can have it.” And I lit it and I smiled too, through all the wet junk in my eyes.
“He rode the car a spell further down the main road away from there, and then he thought better of it, realized there must be traces all over it that would give him away even quicker than he could drive it, so he ran it off a second time, ditched it there out of sight where we found it, and lit out some less conspicuous way. I don’t want to spend too much time on it. This is the case we thought we had, all Wednesday morning and up until about five that afternoon.
“We sent out a general alarm for Dan Ayers, broadcast his description, had the trains and roads and hauling-trucks out of here watched at the city end, we were all busy as a swarm of bees. And then at five that afternoon Mrs. Fleming regained consciousness for a short time—Waggoner had been waiting outside there the whole time to question her—and the first thing she whispered was, ‘Is Dan all right? He didn’t kill Dan, did he?’ What she told us was enough to send us hotfooting back to the house. We pried open the various mirror-panels we’d overlooked the first time and found Ayers’s dead body behind one of them. He’d been stabbed in the back with some kind of an awl or bit. He’d been dead since the night before. She died about eight that next evening. There went our case.”
Cliff didn’t ask it for quite awhile; maybe he hated to himself. Finally he did. “Did you get anything on the real killer?”
“Practically everything—but the guy himself. She was right in the alcove with the two of them when it happened. She got a pretty good look by torchlight, and she lasted long enough to give it to us. All the dope is over at my chief’s office.”
Cliff smacked his own knees, as if in reluctant decision. He got up. “Let’s go over there,” he said slowly. “Let’s go over and give it the once over.” He stopped and looked back at me from the doorway. “C’mon, Vince, you too. I’ll leave a note for Lil.”
He stood out there waiting, until I had to get up. My legs felt stiff.
“C’mon, Vince,” he repeated. “I know this is out of your line, but you better come anyway.”
“Haven’t you got any mercy at all?” I breathed muffledly, as I brushed past him with lowered head.
* * *
—
Cliff trod on my heel twice, going into the constabulary from the deputy’s car, short as the distance was. He was bringing up behind me. It might have been accidental; but I think without it I might have faltered and come to a dead halt. I think he thought so too.
Waggoner was a much younger-looking and trimmer man than I had expected. I’d never met a rural police-official before. I’d thought they chewed straws and ran to galluses. Instead he was teething on a Dunhill pipe, and his trousers looked as though his wife ran a hot iron over them every day. The four of us went into his inner office, at the back of the front room, and the three of them chewed the rag about it—the case—in general terms for awhile. Then he said “Yes,” to Cliff’s question, opened a drawer in one of the filing-cabinets and got out a folder; “we do have a pretty good general description of him, from her. Here’s a transcription of my whole interview with her at the hospital. I had a stenographer take it down at her bedside.” From the folder he removed in turn a quadruple-ply typescript on onionskin, began finger-tracing its double-spaced lines.
“All that,” I thought dismally. “Oh God, all that.”
The room had gotten very quiet. “Our reconstruction of the car-assault on Mrs. Fleming was perfectly accurate, as was our motivation of the safe-looting and its interruption. The only thing is, there’s a switch of characters involved; that’s where we went wrong. Instead of Mrs. Fleming being killed by Ayers, Mrs. Fleming and Ayers were killed by this third person. She saw the awl plunged into Ayers’s back, fled from the house for her life, was pursued down the cut-off by the murderer in Ayers’s car and crushed to death. The murderer then went back, completed his interrupted ransacking of the safe, and concealed Ayers’s body. He also relocked the house, to gain as much time as possible—” His voice became an unintelligible drone. “And so on, and so on.” He turned a page, then his tracing finger stopped. “Here’s what you want, Dodge. The killer was about twenty-five, and fairly skinny. His cheek-bones stood out, cast shadows in the torchlight as it wavered on his face—”
I cupped my hand lengthwise to my cheek, the one turned toward the three of them, and sat there as if holding my face pensively. I was over by the night-blacked window and they were more in the center of the room, under the conelight Waggoner had turned on over his desk.
His tracing finger dropped a paragraph lower, stopped again. “He had light-brown hair. She even remembered that it was parted low on the left side—take a woman to notice a thing like that even at such a moment—and an unusually long forelock that kept falling in front of his face.”
My hand went up a little higher and brushed mine back. It only fell down again like it always did.
“His eyes were fixed and glassy, as though he was mentally unbalanced—”
I saw Cliff glance thoughtfully down at the floor, then up again.
“He had on a knitted sweater under his jacket, and she even took in that it had been darned or rewoven up at the neckline in a different color yarn—”
Lil had made me one the Christmas before, and then I’d burned a big hole in it with a cigarette-spark, and when I’d taken it back to her, she hadn’t been able to get the same color again, it had left a big star-like patch that hit you in the eye— It was back at my room now. I looked out the window, and I didn’t see anything.
His voice went on: “It took us hours to get all this out of her. We could only get it in snatches, a little at a time, she was so low. She went under without knowing Ayers had been killed along with her—”
I heard the onionskin sheets crackle as he refolded them. No one said anything for awhile. Then Cliff asked, “They been buried yet?”
“Yeah, both. Temporarily, in her case; we haven’t been able to contact the husband yet, I understand he’s in South America—”
“Got pictures of them?”
“Yeah, we got death-photographs. Care to see them?”
I knew what was coming up. My blood turned to ice, and I tried to catch Cliff’s eye, to warn him in silent desperation: Don’t make me look, in front of them. I’ll cave, I’ll give myself away. I can’t stand any more of it, I’m played out.
He said off-handedly, “Yeah, let’s have a look.”
Waggoner got them out of the same folder that had held the typescript. Blurredly, I could see the large, gray squares passing from hand to hand. I got that indirectly, by their reflections on the polished black window-square. I was staring with desperate intensity out into the night, head averted from them.
I missed seeing just how Cliff worked it, with my head turned away like that. I think he distracted their attention by becoming very animated and talkative all at once, while the pictures were still in his hands, so that Waggoner forgot to put them back where he’d taken them from. I lost track of them.
The next thing I knew the light had snapped out, they were filing out, and he was holding the inner office-door for me, empty-handed. “Coming, Vince?” We passed through the outside room to the street.
The deputy said, “I’ll run you back there, it’s on my own way home anyway.” He got in under the wheel and Cliff got in next to him. I was just going to get in the back when Cliff’s voice warded me off like a lazy whip. “Run back a minute and see if I left my cigarettes in Mr. Waggoner’s office, Vince.” Then he held Waggoner himself rooted to the spot there beside the car by a sudden burst of parting cordiality. “I want you to be sure and look me up anytime you’re down our way—”
His voice dwindled behin
d me and I was in the darkened inner office again, alone. I knew what I’d been sent back for. He didn’t have any cigarettes in here; he’d given me his last one back at the Fleming house. I found the still-warm cone, curbed its swaying, lit it. They were there on the table under my eyes, he’d left them out there for me purposely.
The woman’s photograph was topmost. The cone threw a narrow pool of bright light. Her face seemed to come to life in it, held up in my hand. It lost its distortion, the stiff ugliness of death. Sight came into the vacant eyes. I seemed to hear her voice again. “There he is, right behind you!” And the man’s came to life in my other hand. That look he’d given me when I’d bent over him, already wounded to death, on the floor. “What did you have to do that for?”
The cone-light jerked high up into the ceiling, and then three pairs of feet were ranged around me, there where I was, flat on the floor. I could hear a blur of awed male voices overhead.
“Out like a light.”
“What did it, you suppose, the pictures? Things like that get him, don’t they? I noticed that already over at the house, before, when I was telling you about the case—”
“He’s not well, he’s under treatment by a doctor right now; he gets these dizzy spells now and then, that’s all it is.” The last was Cliff’s. He squatted down by me on his haunches, raised my head, held a paper cup of water from the filter in the corner to my mouth.
His face and mine were only the cup’s breadth away from one another.
“Yes,” I sighed soundlessly.
“Shut up,” he grunted without moving his lips.
I struggled up and he gave me an arm back to the car. It’s a funny feeling, to lean on someone that’s your natural enemy from now on; that has to be, through force of circumstances. “He’ll be all right,” he said, and he closed the rear car-door on me. It sounded a little bit like a cell-grate.
Waggoner was left behind, standing on the sidewalk in front of his office, in a welter of so-longs and much-obligeds.
We didn’t say anything in the car. We couldn’t; the deputy was at the wheel. We changed to Cliff’s car at the Fleming house, picked Lil up, and she was blazing sore. She laced it into him halfway back to the city. “I think you’ve got one hell of a nerve, Cliff Dodge, leaving me alone like that in a house where I had no business to be in the first place, and going off to talk shop with a couple of corny Keystone cops! Suppose you did leave a note saying where you were, that isn’t the point! This was supposed to be your day off; I can’t have one day in the year with you, without squad-stuff, squad-stuff, squad-stuff! Don’t you get enough of it all week long in the city—”
I think for once he was glad she kept his ears humming like that, kept him from thinking too steadily—about me. She only quit past the city-limits, and then the cold, empty silence that descended could be ascribed to his sulking after the calling-down he’d gotten. Once, near the end, she said: “What’s matter, Vince, don’t you feel well?” She’d caught me holding my head, in the rear-sight mirror.
“The outing was a little bit too strenuous for him,” Cliff said bitterly.
That brought on a couple of postscripts. “No wonder, the way you drive! Next time, try not to get to the place we’re going, and maybe you’ll make it!”
I would have given all my hopes of heaven to be back in that blessed everyday world she was in—where you wrangled and you squabbled, but you didn’t kill. I couldn’t give that, because I didn’t have any hopes of heaven left.
We stopped and he said, “I’ll go up with Vince a minute.”
I went up the stairs ahead of him. He closed the door after us. He spoke low and very undramatically, no fireworks. He said, “Lil’s waiting downstairs, and I’m going to take her home—first, before I do anything. I love Lil. It’s bad enough what this is going to do to her when she finds out; I’m going to see that she gets at least one good night’s sleep before she does.”
He went over to the door, got ready to leave. “Run out—that’s about the best thing you can do. Meet your finish on the hoof, somewhere else, where your sister and I don’t have to see it happen. If you’re still here when I come back, I’m going to arrest you for the murder of Dan Ayers and Dorothy Fleming. I don’t have to ask you if you killed those two people. You fainted dead on the floor when you saw their photographs in death.” He gave the knob a twist, as though he was choking the life out of his own career. “Take my advice and don’t be here when I get back. I’ll turn in my information at my own precinct-house and they can pass it on to Waggoner; then I’ll hand over my own badge in the morning.”
I was pressed up against the wall, as if I were trying to get out of the room where there was no door, arms making swimming-strokes. “I’m frightened,” I said stifledly.
“Killers always are,” he answered. “—afterwards. I’ll be back in about half-an-hour.” He closed the door and went out.
I didn’t move for about half the time he’d given me, thrown scornfully into my face, so to speak. Then I put on the light over the washstand and turned the warm-water tap. I felt my jaw and it was a little bristly. I wasn’t really interested in that. I opened the cabinet and took out my cream and blade and holder, from sheer reflex of habit. Then I saw I’d taken out too much, and I put back the cream and holder. The warm water kept running down. I was in such pain already I didn’t even feel the outer gash when I made it. The water kept carrying the red away down the drain.
It would have been quicker at the throat, but I didn’t have the guts. This was the old Roman way; slower but just as effective. I did it on the left one too, and then I threw the blade away. I wouldn’t need it any more to shave with.
I was seeing black spots in front of my eyes when he tried to get in the door. I tried to keep very quiet, so he’d think I’d lammed and go away, but I couldn’t stand up any more. He heard the thump when I went down on my knees, and I heard him threaten through the door, “Open it or I’ll shoot the lock away!”
It didn’t matter now any more, he could come in if he wanted to, he was too late. I floundered over to the door knee-high and turned the key. Then I climbed up it to my feet again. “You could have saved yourself the trip back,” I said weakly.
All he said, grimly, was: “I didn’t think of that way out,” and then he ripped the ends off his shirt and tied them tight around the gashes, pulling with his teeth till the skin turned blue above them. Then he got me downstairs and into the car.
* * *
—
They didn’t keep me at the hospital, just took stitches in the gashes sent me home, and told me to stay in bed a day and take it easy. I hadn’t even been able to do that effectively. These safety razor-blades, no depth.
It was four when we got back to my room. He stood over me while I got undressed, then thumbed the bed for me to get in.
“What about the arrest?” I asked. “Postponed?” I asked it just as a simple question, without any sarcasm, rebuke or even interest. I didn’t have any left in me to give.
“Canceled,” he said. “I gave you your chance to run out, and you didn’t take it. As a matter of fact I sent Lil home alone, I’ve been downstairs watching the street-door the whole time. When a guy is willing to let the life ooze out of his veins, there must be something to his story. You don’t die to back up lies. You’ve convinced me of your good faith, if not your innocence. I don’t know what the explanation is, but I don’t think you really know what you did that night, I think you’re telling the truth to the best of your knowledge.”
“I’m tired,” I said, “I’m licked. I don’t even want to talk about it any more.”
“I think I better stick with you tonight.” He took one of the pillows and furled it down inside a chair and hunched low in it.
“It’s all right,” I said spiritlessly. “I won’t try it again. I still think it would have been the best way out—”
> Our voices were low. We were both all-in from the emotional stress we’d been through all night long. And in my case, there was the loss of blood. In another minute one or both of us would have dozed off. In another minute it would have eluded us forever. For no combination of time and place and mood and train-of-thought is ever the same twice. It’s like a chemical formula. Vary it one iota and you don’t get the same result.
This was the right minute now, our minute, mine and his. He yawned. He stretched out his legs to settle himself better, the chair had a low seat and he was long-legged. The shift brought them over a still-damp stain, from my attempt. There were traces of it in a straight line, from the washstand all the way over to the door. He eyed them. “You sure picked a messy way,” he observed drowsily.
“Gas is what occurs to most people first, I imagine,” I said, equally drowsily. “It did to me, but this house has no gas. So there was no other way but the blade—”
“Good thing it hasn’t,” he droned. “If more houses had no gas, there’d be fewer—”
“Yeah, but if the bulb in your room burns out unexpectedly, it can be damn awkward. That happened to the fellow in the next room one night, I remember, and he had to use a candle—” My eyes were closed already. Maybe his were too, for all I knew. My somnolent voice had one more phrase to unburden itself of before it, too, fell silent. “It was the same night I had the dream,” I added inconsequentially.
“How do you know he had to use a candle, were you in there at the time?”
His voice opened my eyes again, just as my last straggling remark had opened his. His head wasn’t reared, he was still supine, but his face was turned toward me on the pillow.
“No, he rapped and stuck his head in my door a minute, and he was holding the candle. He wanted to know if my light had gone out too; I guess he wanted to see if the current had failed through the whole house, or it was just the bulb in his room. You know how people are in rooming-houses—”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 17