Death Locked In

by Douglas G. Greene (ed)

  “Listen to me carefully, please,” said The Thinking Machine. When you were placed in a sanitorium, the ivory image was taken away from you. I went into the room where you were confined and gave it back to you. It acted as I thought it would—it quieted you. To make certain that it was this and nothing else that had that effect, I took it away from you again, and you grew violent—as a matter of fact, you became so violent that you overturned a heavy table that was bolted to the floor.

  “I left the image with you. That really was the tangible cause of your condition. If it hadn’t been for that, and your constant brooding over the mystery, the events of that first night would in time have passed out of your mind. But what happened was that you superinduced self-hypnotism with that little image. You understand, of course, that self-hypnotism is possible only to persons of a certain temperament—and only when the object employed to induce self-hypnotism is polished and shiny.

  “Although that image brought you to the condition you were in, I restored the little idol to you to quiet you physically. That was necessary before I could reproduce for you the events of the first night. You went with us in an automobile, from Pelham to the little store where you had stopped that first night for gasoline. We too stopped for gasoline, and saw the man you saw that first night. As a matter of fact, he had gone away only for a short time, and is now installed in the little store again.

  “Well, from the little store we went as you went the night of your first trouble, until we came to the two roads, one leading by sharp turns to the left. Then we went straight to the farmhouse where the old man and the woman lived. There I wanted to convince you that they were real people—that there was nothing of the ghostly about them. As a matter of fact, the old man and the woman never even realized that you were in the house that night. The man had no means of knowing it, so long as you never touched him, nor he you. You say he brought in something to eat. In all probability that was intended for the woman. You assumed it was for yourself. The fire which compelled you to jump, and which resulted in your sprained ankle, did not destroy the house. There were still marks of the fire there; but the heavy rain extinguished it, and carpenters made the necessary repairs. Now all that is clear, isn’t it?”

  “Perfectly; but the white thing in the road—the screaming?”

  “There is no mystery whatever about that,” continued the scientist calmly. “The road that turns to the left turns more sharply than you imagine. After a little distance it goes almost parallel with the main road, so that following it at night you would, without any knowledge of it, pass within a few hundred feet of a point on the main road. Now the house where these people live is, say, five hundred feet from the road that turns to the left—therefore, not more than seven or eight hundred feet, we’ll say, from the main road. Thus the screaming you heard on the main road was from the woman who lived in that house; the figure you saw was that woman. Just why she had left the house and was wandering through the wood, we do not know; it is certain that she was there, and was frightened by the storm. Also, she was probably aware that you were pursuing her, and took refuge on an overhanging limb, thus giving you the impression of her figure rising.

  “It followed naturally that by the time you had taken the roundabout way with your automobile and reached the house, she had already reached it by going straight ahead through the wood—and again you heard her screams there. Many things happened in the house that night of no consequence in themselves, but which to your excited imagination were mysterious. One of these was the incident of the candle going out. It is obvious that a gust of wind did that, or else a leak in the roof.”

  Fairbanks was silent for several minutes as he lay back with his eyes closed. “But the vital thing, the thing that bewildered me most of all,” he said slowly, “you haven’t touched. Why was it that after all my searching I could never again find either the road to the left or the farmhouse?”

  “Of course you don’t remember,” explained The Thinking Machine, “but the night we all went over the route I asked Dr. Pollock and Mr. Hatch just after we left the little store whether they had noticed anything peculiar. They replied in the negative. As a matter of fact,” and the scientist was speaking very quietly, “our automobile went the same way yours had gone—not toward Millen, as you supposed and as they supposed, but back toward Pelham! You never again found the road to the left or the farmhouse for the simple reason that they were on the other side of the little store—toward Pelham, eight or ten miles away.”

  A great wave of relief swept over the young man, and he leaned forward eagerly. “But wouldn’t I have known when I turned the wrong way?”

  The Thinking Machine shrugged his shoulders. “You would have known in daylight, yes,” was the reply, “but at night, in a hurry and confused by the flying dust, you simply turned the wrong way. You see how possible it is when I tell you that neither Dr. Pollock nor Mr. Hatch noticed that we had turned the wrong way, even when there was no storm and when I virtually called it to their attention.”

  There was a long silence. Fairbanks dropped back in the bed, silent.

  “In your manuscript,” resumed The Thinking Machine at last, “you mentioned that you seemed to hear someone calling you as you started away from the little store. This you attributed vaguely to imagination. As a matter of fact, you did hear someone call—it was the man who had sold you the gasoline. He knew you intended going to Millen, saw that you had turned the wrong way, and called to tell you so. You didn’t wait to hear.”

  And that was all there was to the Mystery of the House That Was . . .

  Thin Air by Bill Pronzini (1943- )

  Tales featuring impossible crimes have been around a long time and so for that matter have been stories featuring private eyes, but it hasn’t been exactly the fashion to put both elements into the same stories. There have been exceptions of course, most notably and successfully Jonathan Latimer in the thirties, but it has not been common. In the last ten years, Bill Pronzini has changed all that In a series of novels and short stories his downbeat “Nameless” p. i. has investigated a succession of cunningly wrought impossible mysteries, and the considerable reputation Pronzini already had has been further magnified. There is no doubt about it: Bill Pronzini has been the outstanding addition to the impossible canon in the last decade, and “Thin Air” is one of Nameless’s most mystifying cases.

  THE man I’d been hired to follow was named Lewis Hornback. He was 43, had dark-brown hair and average features, drove a four-door Dodge Monaco, and lived in a fancy apartment building on Russian Hill. He was also cheating on his wife with an unknown woman and had misappropriated a large sum of money from the interior-design firm they coowned. Or so Mrs. Hornback alleged. My job was to dig up evidence to support those allegations.

  Mrs. Hornback had not told me what she intended to do with any such evidence. Have poor Lewis drawn and quartered, maybe—or at least locked away for the rest of his natural life. She was that kind of women—a thin, pinchfaced harridan ten years older than her husband with vindictive eyes and a desiccated look about her, as if all her vital juices had dried up a long time ago. If Hornback really was cheating on her, maybe he had justifiable cause. But that was not for me to say. It wasn’t my job to make moral judgments—all I had to do was make an honest living for myself.

  So I took Mrs. Hornback’s retainer check, promised to make daily reports, and went to work that same afternoon. Hornback, it seemed, was in the habit of leaving their office at five o’clock most weekdays and not showing up at the Russian Hill apartment until well past midnight. At 4:30 I found a parking space near the garage where he kept his car, on Clay near Van Ness. It was a cold and windy November day, but the sky was clear, with no sign of fog above Twin Peaks or out near the Golden Gate. Which was a relief—tail jobs are tricky enough, especially at night, without the added difficulty of bad weather.

  Hornback showed up promptly at five. Eight minutes later he drove his Dodge Monaco down the ramp and turne
d left on Clay. I gave him a block lead before I pulled out behind him.

  He went straight to North Beach, to a little Italian restaurant not far from Washington Square. Meeting the girl friend for dinner, I figured, but it turned out I was wrong. After two drinks at the bar, while I nursed a beer, he took a table alone. I sat at an angle across the room from him, treated myself to pollo al diavolo, and watched him pack away a three-course meal and half a liter of the house wine. Nobody came to talk to him except the waiter; he was just a man having a quiet dinner alone.

  He polished off a brandy and three cigarettes for dessert, lingering the way you do after a heavy meal. When he finally left the restaurant it was almost 7:30. From there he walked over to upper Grant, where he gawked at the young counterculture types who frequent the area, did a little window-shopping, and stopped at a newsstand and a drugstore. I stayed on the opposite side of the street, fifty yards or so behind him. That’s about as close to a subject as you want to get on foot. But the walking tail got me nothing except exercise. Hornback was still alone when he led me back to where he had his car.

  His next stop was a small branch library at the foot of Russian Hill, where he dropped off a couple of books. Then he headed south on Van Ness, north on Market out of the downtown area, and up the winding expanse of upper Market to the top of Twin Peaks. There was a little shopping area up there, a short distance beyond where Market blends into Portola Drive. He pulled into the parking area in front and went into a neighborhood tavern called Dewey’s Place.

  I parked down near the end of the lot. Maybe he was meeting the girl friend here or maybe he had just gone into the tavern for a drink; he seemed to like his liquor pretty well. I put on the grey cloth cap I keep in the car, shrugged out of my coat and turned it inside out—it’s one of those reversible models—and put it on again that way, just in case Hornback had happened to notice me at the restaurant earlier. Then I stepped out into the cold wind blowing up from the ocean and crossed to Dewey’s Place.

  There were maybe a dozen customers inside, most of them at the bar. Hornback was down at the far end with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, but the stools on both sides of him were empty. None of the three women in the place looked to be unescorted.

  So maybe there wasn’t a girlfriend. Mrs. Hornback could have been wrong about that, even if she was right about the misappropriation of business funds. It was 9:45 now. If the man had a lady on the side, they would have been together by this time of night. And so far, Hornback had done nothing unusual or incriminating. Hell, he hadn’t even done anything interesting.

  I sat at the near end of the bar and sipped at a draft beer, watching Hornback in the mirror. He finished his drink, lit a fresh cigarette, and gestured to the bartender for a refill. I thought he looked a little tense, but in the dim lighting I couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t waiting for anybody, though. I could tell that: no glances at his watch or at the door. Just aimlessly killing time? It could be. For all I knew, this was how he spent each of his evenings out—eating alone, driving alone, drinking alone. And his reason might be the simplest and most innocent of all: he left the office at five and stayed out past midnight because he didn’t want to go home to Mrs. Hornback.

  When he had downed his second drink he stood up and reached for his wallet. I had already laid a dollar bill on the bar, so I slid off my stool and left ahead of him. I was already in my car when he came out.

  Now where? I thought as he fired up the Dodge. Another bar somewhere? A late movie? Home early?

  None of those. He surprised me by swinging back east on Portola and then getting into the left-turn lane for Twin Peaks Boulevard. The area up there is residential, at least on the lower part of the hillside. The road itself winds upward at steep angles, makes a figure-eight loop through the empty wooded expanse of Twin Peaks, and curls down on the opposite side of the hill.

  Hornback stayed on Twin Peaks Boulevard, climbing toward the park. So he was probably not going to visit anybody in the area; he had by-passed the only intersecting streets on this side, and there were easier ways to get to the residential sections below the park to the north. I wondered if he was just marking more time, if it was his habit to take a long solitary drive around the city before he headed home.

  There was almost no traffic and I dropped back several hundred feet to keep my headlights out of his rear-vision mirror on the turns. The view from up there was spectacular; on a night like this you could see for miles in all directions—the ocean, the full-sweep of the Bay, both bridges, the intricate pattern of lights that was San Francisco and its surrounding communities. Inside the park we passed a couple of cars pulled off on the lookouts that dotted the area: people, maybe lovers, taking in the view.

  Hornback went through half the figure-eight from the east to west, driving without hurry. Once I saw the brief, faint flare of a match as he lit another cigarette. When he came out on the far side of the park he surprised me again. Instead of continuing down the hill he slowed and turned to the right onto a short, hooked spur road leading to another of the lookouts.

  I tapped my brakes as I neared the turn, trying to decide what to do. The spur was a dead end. I could follow him around it or pull off the road and wait for him to come out again. The latter seemed to be the best choice and I cut my headlights and started to glide off onto a turnaround. But then, over on the spur, Hornback swung past a row of cypress trees that lined the near edge of the lookout. The Dodges brake lights flashed through the trees: then his headlights, too, winked out.

  I kept on going, made the turn, and drifted onto a second, tree-shadowed turnaround just beyond the intersection. Diagonally in front of me I could see Hornback ease the Dodge across the flat surface of the lookout and bring it to a stop nose-up against a perimeter guard rail. The distance between us was maybe 75 yards.

  What’s he up to now? I thought. Well, he had probably stopped there to take in the view and maybe do a little brooding. The other possibility was that he was waiting for someone. A late-evening rendezvous with the alleged girl friend? The police patrol Twin Peaks Park at regular intervals because kids have been known to use it as a lover’s lane, but it was hardly the kind of place two adults would pick for an assignation. Why meet up here when the city is full of hotels and motels?

  The Dodge gleamed a dullish black in the straight. From where I was I could see all of the passenger side and the rear third of the driver’s side; the interior was shrouded in darkness. Pretty soon another match flared, smearing the gloom for an instant with dim yellowish light. Hornback was not quite a chain smoker, but he was the next thing to it—at least a two-pack a day man. I felt a little sorry for him, and a little envious at the same time; I had smoked two packs a day myself until a year and a half ago, when a doctor discovered a benign lesion on one of my lungs. I hadn’t had a cigarette since, though there were still times I craved one. Like right now, watching that dark car and waiting for something to happen or not happen.

  I slouched down behind the wheel and tried to make myself comfortable. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, fifteen. Behind me, half a dozen sets of headlights came up or went down the hill on Twin Peaks Boulevard, but none of them turned in where we were. And nothing moved that I could see in or around the Dodge.

  I occupied my mind by speculating again about Hornback. He was a puzzle, all right. Maybe a cheating husband and a thief, or maybe an innocent on both counts—the victim of a loveless marriage and a shrewish wife. He hadn’t done anything of a guilty or furtive nature tonight, and yet here he was, parked alone at 10:40 P.M. on a lookout in Twin Peaks Park. It could go either way. So which way was it going to go?

  Twenty minutes.

  And I began to feel just a little uneasy. You get intimations like that when you’ve been a cop of one type or another as long as I have—vague flickers of wrongness that seem at first to have no foundation. The feeling made me fidgety. I sat up and rolled down my window and peered across at the Dodge. Darkness. Stillness.
Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Twenty-five minutes.

  The wind was chill against my face and I rolled the window back up, but the coldness had got into the car. I drew my coat tight around my neck and kept staring at the Dodge and the bright mosaic of lights beyond, like luminous spangles on the black-velvet sky.

  Thirty minutes.

  The uneasiness grew and became acute. Something was wrong over there, damn it. A half hour was a long time for a man to sit alone on a lookout, whether he was brooding or not. It was even a long time to wait for a rendezvous. But that was only part of the sense of wrongness. There was something else.

  Hornback had not lit another cigarette since that one nearly half an hour ago.

  The realization made me sit up again. He had been smoking steadily all night long, even during his walk along upper Grant after dinner. When I was a heavy smoker I couldn’t have gone half an hour without lighting up; it seemed funny that Hornback could or would, considering that there was nothing else for him to do in there. He might have run out, of course, yet I remembered seeing a full pack in front of him on the bar at Dewey’s Place.

  What could be wrong? He was alone up here in his car except for my watching eyes; nothing could have happened to him. Unless . . .

  Suicide?

  The word popped into my mind and made me feel even colder. Suppose Hornback was innocent of infidelity, but suppose he was also despondent over the state of his marriage. Suppose all the aimless wandering tonight had been a prelude to an attempt on his own life—a man trying to work up enough courage to kill himself on a lonely road high above the city. It was possible. I didn’t know enough about Hornback to judge his mental stability.

  I wrapped both my hands around the wheel, debating with myself. If I went over to his car and checked on him and he was all right, I would have blown not only the tail but my client’s trust. But if I stayed here and Hornback had taken pills or done God knew what to himself, I might be sitting passively by while a man died.