Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  Among those called on as witnesses was Leroy, Bernice’s Harvard-accent doorman. His last name was Devereaux, I found out. He came to court without his uniform and wearing a fuzzy caramel-colored suit with patch pockets and a half belt in back that would have driven any college freshman insane with longing. With this went beige spats, four inches of brown-silk handkerchief hanging out of his breast pocket, and, I am almost positive, a walking stick hanging up somewhere in the courthouse checkroom.

  He sat up there at elegant ease, and no man in the room could match his English. It was really as delightful as it was instructive to listen to him speak, but I noticed the judge had to turn his head away several times during the course of the cross-questioning.

  Leroy told how I had appeared about nine in Bernice’s lobby, passed a grip I was carrying to him, and then insisted I had just had a message from him on her behalf to come up there, which he again flatly denied having sent me, just as he had that night. This point held them up for fully half an hour, and only the liquidity of Leroy’s vowels kept me from returning to look out of the window again in spite of Berenson’s admonition. When they had finally decided that it was the relief man who had sent the message (and I saw Berenson give me a triumphant look, but what about I couldn’t imagine), Leroy was allowed to go ahead. He told them he had asked me if I wanted to be announced, whereupon (the “whereupon” was his own, too) I had given him an odd look and remarked: “Miss Pascal expects me more than she ever expected any one in her life.” At which point I heard a buzz of excitement rise from the onlookers at the back of the room. The judge struck the desk with his mallet, and when they had grown quiet again. Westman, the prosecuting attorney, asked Leroy to describe the look he said I had given him.

  “It was a, I should say a sinister look,” Leroy said.

  I had never known just how to pronounce that word until I heard him use it.

  “Explain what you mean,” Westman said.

  “It was the look of a man who is dangerous, who is capable of almost anything. Well, there’s no other word for it, it was a sinister look, that was all,” Leroy informed him dogmatically.

  I felt like jumping up then and there and protesting that it couldn’t have been that kind of a look because I hadn’t known how to pronounce the word at the time.

  “Has the defendant that look on him now?” Westman went on.

  Leroy turned to look at me, and I certainly had, even if I’d never had it before; I was glaring at him with all my might. “Thoroughly,” he said, turning away again in a hurry.

  From there he went on to say that he had next seen me at about quarter to ten, and had been very much taken aback, because I was going in again like the time before, and he hadn’t seen me come out at all. And that I had told him to get the police, I would be up in Bernice’s apartment.

  When Berenson took him over, he asked him a few desultory questions first, and then suddenly skipped all the intermediate evidence to inquire with beguiling deference what his, Leroy’s, theory was as to how I had managed to leave the building without being seen either by himself or the elevator operator. I couldn’t figure out why he was asking that at this late day. The whole town, or anyway as large a part of it as was following the case, knew by this time I had come down the emergency staircase when neither of them were looking. That had been in the confession I had signed.

  Leroy smiled tolerantly and said, “We all know how he accomplished that—” and repeated what I had done.

  “In that case,” Berenson said quickly, “would it have been equally possible for any one else to have used the same staircase that evening — and not be seen by you or any one in the lobby?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Leroy replied haughtily. “I’m kept quite busy before the house procuring cars. Especially around dinnertime. And after all, I don’t expect people to slink—”

  “Answer yes or no!” Berenson snapped. “Would it have been equally possible for any one else to have come down those stairs that night and left the building without being seen by you?”

  “Yes,” Leroy answered sulkily. I suppose he didn’t like to be confined to one-syllable words because there wasn’t as much opportunity to pronounce them beautifully.

  “That’s all,” Berenson said. Leroy uncoiled himself, stood up so that every one would have a fair chance to admire and profit by his attire, and left the stand walking on air. Some rude damsel in back tittered.

  Berenson called someone I’d never seen before in his place. Also colored. I began to wonder if Bernice and I were the only white people involved in this case. This one, it soon turned out, was the reliefman. He had been on duty, he said, from seven until nine that evening. He had not telephoned any message to me from Bernice. He had not telephoned any message to anybody from Bernice. He had not telephoned any message to anybody from anybody. Every dwelling in the building had its own private phone; the only calls he had received were incoming ones, there had only been two of those, and one had been a wrong number and the other a lady who wished to have her husband informed, when he got home, that he was to come right out again and meet her at Tony’s, Jimmy was there. “Your witness,” Berenson said after a sufficient amount of this.

  I now understood his triumphant look to me awhile back, when Leroy had been on the stand, and the phone message I had gotten had been credited to the relief man. But I still didn’t understand what he had to be, feel, or look triumphant about. After all, even if the message was proven to be fake (and I was beginning to think it was myself, because the relief man’s voice didn’t even approach the Octavus-Roy-Cohen dialect that had greeted my ears over the wire), that didn’t prove that I hadn’t gone up there and done it myself anyway. It merely suggested feebly, if one were inclined to be prejudiced in my favor, that I had been framed by some person or persons unknown. And on the other hand, there was only my word for it that there had been any such message at all. Only Maxine and I had been there when the phone rang; what chance had Berenson of proving it to the jury?

  I noticed that Westman himself considered this point so immaterial to the evidence that he didn’t even try very hard to shake the relief man’s insistence on not having sent the call, just let him go after a question or two. When the case was adjourned for that day, Berenson came up to me almost exuberantly, he seemed so pleased with the way things had gone, and giving my biceps a furtive, encouraging grip, breathed, “Wait’ll to-morrow, kid! It’s going to start getting rosy from now on. They’re calling Tenacity!”

  I had a peculiar dream that night in the cell of a sort of black Bernice, whom I was very much in love with, but the color of whose skin kept rubbing off on my clothes every time I went near her. And each time it did, she sort of cried out in pain, so that my heart was wrung.

  Next day, about halfway through the morning’s session, the famous Tenacity’s name was at last called. “Tenacity Lowell! Take the stand, please.” They waited; no sign of her. They called her a second time, louder than before. I turned to look. The people in the back of the room were twisting their heads this way and that, but no one came forward. All the faces but one were unmistakably Caucasian — and that one belonged to the unforgetable Leroy, who was present again. She wasn’t to have been a witness for the defense, far from it, but when it came down to it, Berenson’s face showed more disappointment and worry than the prosecuting attorney’s by far, I thought.

  After a minute’s hiatus, the case went grinding ponderously on without her. Westman called another name, one that I didn’t recognize, and an unknown took the stand. The seemingly interminable succession of ebony witnesses had finally come to an end with him. Which was something. But even Leroy’s sartorial splendor paled to nothingness compared to what was now on display. His clothes fitted as though they had been poured over him hot and allowed to harden. And he had a gardenia in his coat. Or maybe it was only a white carnation.

  “Do you recognize this defendant?” said Westman ominously.

  “I do,” he said readil
y. “Like hell you do,” I growled to myself, “when’d I ever see you before?”

  “Tell the court your story,” Westman ordered.

  The new witness took hold of one cuff, and then the other, and meticulously pulled them down an inch below the sleeve of his coat. “The Saturday before I read about this murder,” he announced in a clear, ringing voice that carried all the way to the end of the room and back with a lot left over, “I was coming out of the Cort Theater, where I worked at the time, and this man was standing at the stage entrance.” Then all at once I remembered who he was. “Well, for the love of Mike!” I thought with a gasp, “is that going to be brought up too?” It wouldn’t have surprised me any more to see my old teacher from school come parading in to tell all about how I had broken a window with an eraser in 8-B.

  The stage-trained voice went on and on without even a moment’s loss for a word, without even an “er” or an “um.” For the First time since the trial had begun, I found myself a little uncomfortable, embarrassed, wishing I didn’t have to sit there in the room. For all I knew, he might have every intention of telling why he had taken me up to the flat in the first place. But he had that part nicely under control, it soon appeared. “—when we got to where I lived, I found out that my friend the stage manager hadn’t waited, he may have had a headache or something that evening, but the thing is he hadn’t waited, he’d gone home. So I turned to this man and told him that I thought the best thing for him to do would be to call around at the theater the following Monday, a little earlier if possible to make sure my friend hadn’t gone home yet, and then borrow the hundred dollars — never knowing what type person he was!” And he paused dramatically, with a neat little spread of the hands, to let my awful double-facedness sink in upon his listeners. “Before I quite realized what was happening,” he went on, “he had forced his way in, struck me in the face so that I was simply covered with blood and nearly lost consciousness, and robbed me of the hundred dollars. Me!” he repeated with orchidaceous indignation, indicating his cravat, “who had tried to do him a good turn!” And flashing me a sulky look, as much as to say, “Now look what you got!” he turned his profile the other way.

  I couldn’t help noticing that the atmosphere in the courtroom, particularly on the part of the spectators, wasn’t nearly as sympathetic as it might have been, considering the amount of effort and dramatic suspense he had put into his recital. But it was reverence itself compared to what was brought on later, when Berenson had taken him over.

  He began by asking him: “Did you report this incident to the police at the time it happened, Mr. Saint-Clair?”

  “Sinclair. It’s pronounced as if it were spelt s-i-n. I told Mr. Westman that.”

  Berenson roared, “I didn’t ask you how you say your name! I asked you if you reported this alleged robbery to the police at the time!”

  “No,” replied the witness heatedly, “and you don’t have to yell at me like that, either!”

  When the gale of merriment had subsided and he could make himself audible once more, Berenson demanded, “Why not? Why didn’t you?”

  “For reasons of my own.”

  “Will you kindly tell the court what they are?” Berenson insisted.

  “Because I was afraid it might hurt me professionally,” Mr. Sinclair answered unwillingly. I could tell, even from where I was, that he was a little less at ease than he had been up to now.

  “But you claim you were the one who was robbed,” Berenson said dulcetly. “How could that hurt you professionally or otherwise?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the witness answered peevishly. “I just had an idea that it might, that was all!”

  I was almost expecting Berenson to wind up by getting him to admit he was the one who had done the robbing, before he was through.

  “And yet you’re willing enough to come here today and tell your story to the court, irrelevant as it may be. How is that, Mr. Sinclair?”

  “I’m not working now,” he said lamely. “I was then.”

  “Well, I don’t pretend to understand the ethics of the theatrical profession,” Berenson remarked stingingly. “We’ll let that part of it go. Where did you have this money, this hundred and fifteen dollars you say the defendant stole from you?”

  “In my apartment.”

  “We already know that, Mr. Sinclair,” Berenson said patiently. “Just whereabouts was it? Under the rug?”

  There was a preliminary titter or two from the back, but I, who already knew the answer that Berenson was bound to get if he kept on insisting, held on to the chair I was on.

  The Sinclair gentleman suddenly lost the little temper that remained to him and blurted out vindictively, “In the bathroom, behind the toilet paper! Now are you satisfied?”

  The judge had to threaten to have the room cleared no less than three times before the ribald outbursts this had brought on were effectively stemmed. It took nearly three minutes, I should judge. And by that time, the hunted yet venomous look on Mr. Sinclair’s face would have drawn pity from any one but a courtroom audience.

  When he was released from the stand (Berenson told me later that he cut such a ridiculous figure, he had benefited rather than harmed us), he made his way to the back of the room with a rapidity that almost resembled flight, and disappeared through the big frosted-glass doors to the accompaniment of a playful hiss from some young woman or other seated back there.

  I thought he had come back again, possibly to avenge himself on her or on all of us, a moment later when I saw everyone’s head turning that way, from the jury to the very court attendants, and heard a commotion at the door. People began to stand up in their seats here and there to look over the heads of others, and the judge’s gavel had no effect for a moment or two. Westman hurriedly quit his place before the witness-box and disappeared toward the back of the room, and when a line of vision had been cleared, I saw him standing before a woman whose entire face was wound with bandages so that not even the eyes showed through, supported on either side by a colored man and woman as though she could hardly stand up.

  She was taken out of the room again as soon as he had finished speaking to her two attendants, for it was evident that she herself couldn’t talk, and after he had conferred with the judge, the latter rapped and announced that court was adjourned until the following day owing to the incapacitation of one of the principal witnesses for the state, Tenacity Lowell.

  The way Berenson came to me when I had been escorted back, you would have thought his own life was at stake and not mine. “They threw acid at her,” he gasped despondently, “right in the doorway of her own flat! She’s lost an eye, and the whole lower part of her face’s been eaten away — can’t talk even if she wanted to.” He gave me a searching look. “It’s not going to be easy now, Wade.”

  “Do you think it has anything to do with this?” I asked him. “With the case?”

  “Do I think!” he said bitterly.

  “But she was Westman’s witness — what would they want to bawl up the prosecution for like that, if I’m supposed to be taking the rap for some one?”

  “Listen, you knew her when she was Pascal’s maid — did she ever strike you as being anything intelligent? Well, whatever she knew, I could’ve gotten out of her. And she knew, all right! And they knew she knew. They weren’t taking unnecessary chances—”

  “Gee, that was a lousy thing to do,” I commented.

  “Feel sorry for yourself, Wade,” he advised me knowingly. “If it wasn’t for that very wench there, Pascal would be alive right now in California with you. She was the one sent them the tip-off that night — I know what I’m talking about!” He lit a cigarette and shook it at me when it was lit. “She got Pascal hers that night. And now, indirectly, she’s getting you yours. Don’t look at me like that,” he said fiercely. “Do you think I’m talking through my hat or something! I had a damn good chance of getting you out of it if Westman had put her on the stand. And now — you may as well hear it from me as
from any one else — I think it’s too late for me to pull you through. You’re in the soup.”

  “And what about it?” I said. “I could’ve been in Montreal or Winnipeg the day after it happened, if I’d wanted to. And still be there today, if I’d wanted to badly enough. Only I didn’t want to. I wanted to be where I am. And I wanted to get just what I’m going to get, nothing less and nothing more.”

  “The case is closing,” he warned me, “and there’s not much time left! There’s only one thing that might still do some good — how much I don’t know. I can let you take the stand yourself — in your own defense.”

  “Do that,” I said, “and hear all about how I choked Bernice Pascal to death.”

  “You’re insane,” he spat at me. “I should have pleaded that for you in the first place.”

  “Sane or insane,” I told him grimly, “cook I must — in the big, high chair.”

  “Don’t bother wishing for it,” he said. “It’ll come quickly enough. And once this case closes, Mr. Know-it-all, an appeal isn’t going to help any!” He flung his cigarette down, reached over, and caught me by the wrist. “Get up there, will you, Wade, if I call on you tomorrow, and tell them the truth — for the love of Christ, tell them the truth! Tell them how you loved her — tell them what she meant to you — talk to them just like you have to me at times — they’re not morons, they’ll understand how it is you couldn’t have possibly done it. My God, there’s something sincere about you when you start talking about her — that would get anyone! Any one who was ever young, who was ever in love himself—” With his hand glued to my wrist, he kept shaking me by the arm. “What can I say to you, fellow, to make you understand? Tell them how she auctioned herself off for a hundred dollars that night — tell them, don’t be ashamed! Tell them how you went out hunting it up. Tell them how you robbed this actor. It’s not going to hurt you; it’s going to help you, if anything! You did it for her. You’ll have that jury in the hollow of your hand. The average man is more of a sentimentalist deep down in himself than any woman alive. Why, the very fact that you signed that confession may be all to the good in the end! You loved her so — that you didn’t want to live; that stands to reason. I still have the taxi driver, to tell them how you were all the way down to Grand Central, could have gotten away beautifully! How’re they going to get around the fact that you didn’t even know how she had been killed when you first told your story to the police? I’ll take care of that, I’ll bring it all out when I sum up — but you — you’ve got to get up there and help me! We’ve still got this one chance, Wade, slim as it is — don’t be a quitter, you owe me something; do this much for me at least. Other clients plead with their lawyers to get them out; here’s a lawyer pleading with his client—”