“No, I didn’t notice anyone with a scar here last night. He might have been here and just happened to have that side of his face turned away from me each time I got a look at him. But even so, he wasn’t anyone I know personally. I don’t know anyone with a scar.”
“Some guy got in here, and you not only didn’t know him but didn’t even see him the whole time he was in your place. What kind of people are you anyway?”
“Well, that’s the way we live, mister. We may be careless but we have a helluva good time.”
Denny scanned him for several uncomfortable minutes. Suddenly he said, “Mind if I look around?”
“N-no, go ahead.” They were both frightened, but in the vague way of people that don’t know what to expect next. It wasn’t a fear that had a definite focus.
I didn’t get what he was after for a minute. I trailed after him, and they trailed after me. In each room he went into, he only had eyes for the closet—when there was one. Or rather, the keyhole in the closet.
There was only one that didn’t have a key sticking out of it. We got to it finally. It was painted white. It was in a little room at the back, a sort of spare room. My heart started to pick up speed. It seemed to stand out from the walls, as if it was coated with luminous paint. My eyes almost seemed to be able to pierce it, as though they were X-rays, and make out, huddled on the inside—I looked around in cold, sick fear in the split second that we all stood there grouped in the doorway. That mission type table over there, didn’t it look like the very one I had upended against the locked closet? That window, with the dark shade drawn all the way down to the bottom—“No, you can’t get out that way, that’s a dead window, blocked with bricks.” I didn’t have the nerve to step over to it and raise the shade.
Denny had tightened up too, I could see. He didn’t take out the key I’d found on my bureau. Instead he said, “D’you mind unlocking that?”
Right away they both got flustered. They both looked at each other helplessly. She said to him, “Where’d we put it this time?”
He said, “I dunno, you were the one put it away. I told you to pick the same place each time; you keep changing the place, and then we can’t find it ourselves!”
They both started looking high and low. She explained to Denny, “We call that closet The Safe. When we feel one of these parties coming on, we gather up everything valuable and shove it all in there, and lock it up till it’s over.”
Denny didn’t look convinced or relenting. I was leaning against the door-frame, I needed support.
“It’s all our own stuff,” she added placatingly.
He gave her the stony eye.
The harder they looked, the more flustered they got. I kept wondering why he didn’t take out the key he had and fit it in, why did he have to torture me this way? My chest was pounding like a dynamo. Was he in there, whoever he was? Would he topple out on us when it was opened finally? But if they’d known about it, they would have smuggled him out long ago, wouldn’t they? Or else beat it away from here themselves, not lain asleep until evening. Or suppose they hadn’t known about it themselves, still didn’t? That wouldn’t make my guilt any the less flagrant.
The Sorrell woman suddenly gave a yelp of triumph, from the direction of the bedroom, where the ever-widening search had led her. She came running in with it, holding it up between her fingers. You could hardly distinguish what it was, it was all clotted with some white substance. “I hid it in my cold-cream tin, I remember now!” she exulted. “Luckily I stopped a minute to rub a little on—”
Denny wouldn’t let her get over to the keyhole with it; he took it over, inserted it himself, gave it a twist, and the door swung out. Furs, silverware, hand-luggage, everything that predatory guests might have made off with was piled up in it. But no dead bodies.
I had to sit down for a minute, I felt weak all over.
“It’s all our own stuff,” the woman said for the third or fourth time. “Did somebody tell you we had something in there didn’t belong to us?”
“No, just an idea of mine,” Denny said quietly. He handed the key back and turned away.
It was dusk when we left the Sorrell apartment. All day someone had lain murdered in a closet, and we were no nearer to knowing where. And now it was night again, the second night since it had happened. We stood down there on the street outside the place. Because we didn’t know where to go now. There was a gap. The first step had led into the second, but the second had led into a vacuum.
“Well, my way didn’t pay off,” he said glumly. “The thing’s broken in two.” He turned and looked up at the lighted windows behind us. “And I’m inclined to give the Sorrells the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think they really knew this man with the scar. I don’t think they really noticed him up there in their place last night. I don’t think they realized anyone had cocaine on him and passed some to you. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt—for the present. I can’t go after it the way I would ordinarily, have them watched, check their movements, track down as many people as I can who were at the party, in hopes of finally getting a line on him. We haven’t time. We’ll have to jump the gap blindfolded and try for the third foothold—the room with the singing walls.”
We passed a cigar store and Denny went in, stepped inside the phone booth. I figured it was to Headquarters, without his telling me so. It was. He came back, said: “Well our margin of safety still holds, they haven’t found him yet. I checked on all reported homicides, and there’s no one been turned up stabbed in a closet—as of 6:45 this evening.” He gave me a look. “But that don’t mean there’s no one in a closet still waiting to be turned up. We’ve got to hustle.”
Sure we did—but where?
“Can you remember leaving here at all?”
“No, there’s a complete blank. The next I knew was the room with the singing walls. Scarface reappeared in that sequence, so I must have left with him, he must have taken me there from here.”
“Obviously. But that don’t tell us where it is.” It was strangely topsy-turvy, this thing. Ordinarily they get the murdered remains first, have to go out and look for the murderer. In this case he had the murderer at hand from the beginning, and couldn’t find out where the remains were. Even the murderer couldn’t help him. “About those so-called singing walls. Was it a radio you heard through them? That’s the first thing occurs to me, of course.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. There wasn’t a scrap of human voice, of station announcement in between. If I was able to distinguish the tunes clearly enough to recognize them, I would have been able to hear the announcer too, wouldn’t I? And there’s at least a title given between numbers on any radio program.”
“You can’t remember how you got there? Not even the vaguest recollection? Whether it was on foot, or in a cab, or in a car with him, or by bus, or trolley?”
“No. Any more than I can remember how I got away afterw— Wait!” I broke off suddenly.
“What is it?” he pounced.
“I just remembered a little detail I didn’t tell you before; I wonder if it’s any good to you or not.”
“I told you I never throw anything away. Let me have it.”
“I either spent or lost ten cents sometime during the course of the night. When I met Fraser on the street, I had thirty-five cents in my pocket. I can remember standing there jingling it just before he came up to me. This morning there was only twenty-five cents on my bureau. I was out a dime. D’you think I spent it making my way home—from wherever this was?”
He liked that right away, I could see; he liked that a lot. “It could be a yardstick, to measure just how far out this place was, if nothing else. It don’t give us the direction, but it might give us the approximate distance. Can you remember making your way back at all?”
“Yeah, partly; only the opening stages, though. I remember slinking alon
g, hugging walls and doorways, scared stiff. I don’t remember what part of town I was in, though. And then the curtain came down again, I don’t remember how I got back finally—”
“What kind of coins was this thirty-five cents in, when you had it last night, can you remember that?”
“Easily, I counted it over enough times. Three nickels and two dimes. And this morning there were only the three nickels and a dime left.”
“That’s important,” he said. “The fact that the three nickels were carried over eliminates the possibility that you paid a nickel fare or a fifteen cent fare. If you paid any fare at all, you paid an exact ten cents. It’s still possible you lost the dime, of course, but we can’t let that stop us. If you spent a dime fare, that eliminates trolleys—and of course taxis. Now the bus system here runs on a mileage basis, you know that. Five cents for a certain distance, then ten, then fifteen from there on, for as far as they carry you. This missing dime seems to show you boarded an inbound bus at some point within the ten cent zone and rode in toward our place.
“D’you see what I’m driving at, so far? We’re looking for someplace, in that ten cent bus ride zone, where there’s music playing late at night, until two or three in the morning. And not a radio, either a real band or a phonograph that changes its own records by automatic control. Some roadhouse or resort or pavilion, or even just a hole-in-the-wall taproom. And then we’re looking for a room right upstairs over it, or right next door to it, with a partition wall so thin it lets this music come whispering through. There’s our problem.”
“But it seemed to me I did a lot of this running away on foot first; my starting point might have been quite a distance off from this ten cent bus zone.”
“It seemed that way. I doubt you did in your condition. Narcotics distort your time sense, for one thing. Just down the block and around a couple of corners, to you, might have seemed like an endless flight that went on for hours. Then again, of course, you may be right about it; I wasn’t on your feet. The only way we’ll find out is to put it to the proof.”
There were two bus lines that passed the immediate neighborhood our own flat was in, the Fairview line and one that went out to the municipal beach at Duck Island. The routes were parallel this far in, they only diverged further out. The double route was two blocks over from our place.
“We’ll take whichever one comes along first,” he said while we stood waiting by the stop. “It’s a toss up between the two.”
A Fairview one hove into sight first, outward-bound of course. We got on and he said, “Two ten cent fares.” Then he stood there behind the driver’s back and, company regulations to the contrary, asked, “How many stops do you make in the ten cent zone?” They ran on fixed stops.
“Only three.” He gave us the intersection names. “After that, it jumps to fifteen.”
“Well, offhand, could you mention any inns or dance joints out that way, where the music plays late?”
“Try Dixie Trixie’s, that’s just outside the city limits—”
Denny cut him short. “No, I’m asking you about the ten cent zone, between Continental and Empire Road.”
“Naw, that’s a sweatshop district, I don’t think you’ll find many around there, one or two honkytonks maybe.”
“We’ll have to do our own scouting then,” Denny said to me. He led the way back to a seat. He swore bitterly under his breath, “We’ll be at it all night.”
We got out at Continental, the first ten cent stop, and he did a little surveying before we moved off the bus right-of-way. The task before us wasn’t as bad as it had threatened to be at first sight. It was no cinch by any means, but at least he was able to put physical limits to the terrain we had to finecomb. The bus stops were an even eight blocks apart. A railroad embankment walled us off six blocks to the left, and a large park with a lake in it dead-ended the streets four blocks over the other way. He divided the difference between the two bus stops, multiplied it by ten crosswise blocks, and that gave us forty square blocks to canvass for each bus stop.
Naturally, it wasn’t a question of going into every doorway of every building along those forty blocks, that would have still been pretty much of a physical impossibility. A cop on the beat here, a storekeeper there, was able to speed us through by listing the places in his immediate vicinity that provided music late at night. That way we sometimes only had to make one stop in five or six blocks. We investigated several bars which had coin phonographs, but none had all four of the selections that I’d remembered hearing in their repertoire.
We went back and boarded the bus, rode one stop ahead, and started the whole thing over. Same lack of results. The closest we got to anything in this sector was when the harness cop told us there had been a lot of complaints about a Polish family playing their phonograph late at nights with all the stops out. But they didn’t own any of the records we were looking for.
We went back, caught another bus, got out at the third and last ten cent stop, and finished the chore out. That fizzled too. We limped aboard an in-bound bus and rode back to where the Duck Island line diverged from this one. The thought of going through the same routine all over again, on a new bus route, was more than we could face without a breathing spell. We dragged ourselves into the nearest resting place we could find, which happened to be a lunch wagon, when we left the bus and just sat there slumped over the counter, too tired even to hold our backs up straight, chins nearly dunked in our coffee cups, talking it over in low voices so the counterman wouldn’t overhear us.
“Even if I wanted to take you down with me and report it—and I don’t, God knows—I couldn’t until we’ve found out where it happened. They’d have to have that. And the longer it takes and the colder it gets, the harder it’s going to be to clear you.” He looked down at the wax-white, trembling hand I’d suddenly braked on his arm. “What is it?”
“Did you hear that, just then?”
He turned and looked over at the wire-mesh loudspeaker that looked like a framed fly swatter, set on a low shelf near the coffee boiler.
“They just got through playing Alice Blue Gown and now—”
He didn’t get me for a minute. “But this wagon’s in the middle of a vacant plot, you saw that when we came in. There aren’t any adjoining—”
“No, no, you haven’t been paying attention to the program, I have. They got through Blue Gown a minute or two ago; now they’ve gone into Out on a Limb. Listen, hear it? That’s the same order I heard them in last night—there.”
“That’s just a coincidence. There must be six thousand bands all over the country playing those two pieces day and night the last few weeks—”
“The third one’ll tell. The third one was Oh Johnny.” I could hardly wait for it to end; it never seemed to, it seemed to go on forever. I balled a fist and beat it into the hollow of my hand to hurry it up. He sat there straining his ears too; his back was held a little straighter now.
It wound up finally, there was a short pause. Then a nondescript introduction. Then the tune itself. I grabbed him with both hands this time, nearly toppled him off the tall stool he was perched on. “Oh Johnny! That’s not a coincidence any more. That’s the same sequence I heard them in last night. That’s the same band.”
“But I thought you said it wasn’t a broadcast, you heard no station announcements. This is.”
“But there are no station announcements on this either, it’s evidently a program that only makes one every five or six numbers. I still don’t think it was a broadcast; this isn’t the same hour I heard them, and they wouldn’t broadcast twice in one night. But I think it was the same band, I’m sure of it. Maybe they broadcast first, and then play in person somewhere later on—”
The Woodpecker Song had started in. I turned around to tell him that, not sure if he knew tunes by ear as well as I did. But he’d had enough; the stool next to me was empty and he was alrea
dy over at the pay phone on the wall. His nickel chimed in along with the opening notes. “What station you tuned at?” he called out. The counterman read the dial, gave him some hick station I’d never heard of before. He got its studio number from Information. “Who’s that you got going out over the air now?” I heard him ask them. Then, “Bobby Leonard’s Band? Find out where they work from about one to three or four every night. Hurry it up, it’s important. No, I can’t wait until they’re through broadcasting, this is police business. Write the question on a slip of paper and hand it in right where they are now.” He had to wait a minute until the answer was relayed back, evidently scribbled on the same piece of paper. “The Silver Slipper, eh, out on Brandon Drive.” He hung up, bounced a coin on the counter, and ran out. We’d both stopped being tired, like magic.
“It’s all the way over on the other side of town,” he said to me in the cab. “God only knows how you found your way back to our place. It shows you what a wonderful thing the subconscious is, even under the influence of a drug.”
We got to it in about twenty minutes, paid off the cab, and stood there sizing it up. It was mostly glass, you could look in on three sides; it had a glass roof that could be pushed back in fine weather so they could dance under the open sky. The fourth wall was solid masonry. Only a scattered couple or two were dancing. They evidently used a radio to provide the incidental music, until this Leonard and his band came over and did a lick later on.
He snapped his head around to me. “Familiar?”
I shook mine. “Not a flicker of it comes back to me.”
On the fourth side it backed against two buildings, which in turn were set back to back, each one facing a different street. We cased them both, from their respective corners. One was a trim, two story cement garage, that looked as if it had only recently been put up. The other was a sort of run-down lodging-house, with a milky lighted globe pallidly shining down over its doorway. It was the obvious choice of the two; garages don’t have closets. Nor furniture to pile up in front of them either.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 62