The Red Right Hand

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  Whatever kind of voice he had, it was a voice to be noticed and remembered, it would seem. She remembered it. But that is all there is about his voice. There is no one except her who ever heard him. No one who is now alive.

  He did not tell St. Erme and her that his name was Corkscrew, of course. He told them his name was Doc.

  I have been looking over Rosenblatt’s notebook again, his notes on Corkscrew.

  There is the question of his height:

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] You say that he was small, Miss Darrie. A small man. Do you mean that he was frail?

  A. No, not frail. His torso and shoulders seemed normal in size, his arms rather long, with heavy wrists and hands. It was more that he was just sawed off. His legs seemed short for his body. He was only about five feet three inches tall.

  Q. His legs seemed corkscrewed, his knees bent, as if he was crouching?

  A. It was the baggy pants he wore, I think.

  Q. If he had been crouching, and had straightened up, then he would have been a tall man?

  A. No, not particularly tall. He could not have been so tall as Mr. Quelch here or Inis.

  Q. About as tall as Dr. Riddle here, perhaps?

  A. Yes, about that tall, he might have been, if he had been taller.

  Q. That would be about five feet seven and a half.

  A. [By Dr. Riddle] A good guess, Lieutenant. I am just five feet eight....

  There is the question of the color of his eyes, also, an important item in any system of police identification.

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] His eyes were red, you say? You mean pink like an albino’s?

  A. No, the irises of his eyes were blue. A medium blue or gray. But his eyeballs, the whites of them, were inflamed and red, and even in the irises the red seemed to shine through. You noticed it at once.

  Q. [To Di. Riddle] What might that be?

  A. It sounds as though it might have been chronic blepharitis.

  Q. What’s that, Doctor?

  A. It’s a condition of disease. However, I would not care to make any positive statement without having seen him.

  Q. You never saw him at all?

  A. I have never seen him.

  Q. If he knew something about medicine, there would be some things he could do to his eyes to make them look red, without having a disease, I suppose?

  A. He would not necessarily have to know anything about medicine....

  There is also the matter of his torn ear, on which Rosenblatt seemed to place particular emphasis, since the ear is one of the most significant indices of identity according to the Bertillon system, as I understand it. And while the ordinary untrained observer does not pay attention to the shape of a man’s ears, any great deviation from the normal in them no doubt would stand out.

  The question comes up in the inquiry of Quelch, the somewhat garrulous postmaster at Whippleville, who was the last man to see that incredible killer before Dead Bridegroom’s Pond.

  Q. [To Mr. Quelch] You are the postmaster at Whippleville, Mr. Quelch? And you saw this man called Doc in the back seat of Mr. St. Erme’s and Miss Darrie’s car when they stopped at the post office in Whippleville about seven-thirty to inquire about some place where they might have a picnic supper?

  A. Yes. I was standing on the front porch, just closing up, when this big gray car drove up, with that fellow in the back. It was going on seven-thirty-six, nearer than seven-thirty, and the afternoon mail from Pittsfield had been distributed, and nothing more till the mail truck at six o’clock tomorrow morning with the Danbury papers. There wasn’t anybody left to talk to, so I thought I might as well go home and talk to the danged cat. Then this big car drove up. Miss Darrie was driving it, and a pretty picture she was, too, with her dark curly hair and her pink checks, and those blue-rimmed glasses she was wearing. And Mr. St. Erme said they were on their way to Vermont to get married, they were planning to drive all night, and they thought they would stop for a picnic supper; did I know any pretty places where they wouldn’t be trespassing on anybody’s front yard? And I said there was nothing but lakes and woods and rocks, nothing like Coney Island that they’ve got in New York, but some liked it, and they were welcome to it. And he said how about that road back there a couple of hundred feet, that road off to the side that they’d just passed, were there any pretty places on it? And I said that’s the Stony Falls road and it’s a bumpy, stony road and nobody lives on it but Old Man Hinterzee and John Wiggins that raises bees and has a cider mill, and two or three artists and old college professors that have their places they have bought to live at in the summers, but there are plenty of woods along it, and there’s a lake up the road about a mile, about a mile this side of Old Man Hinterzee’s, that doesn’t belong to anybody, and it has woods and rocks around it, and he and his lady could have a picnic there, I guess, and it’s a kind of pretty lake, only it’s mighty black and deep, and some call it Lake Tagore, only most call it Dead Bridegroom’s Pond. And Miss Darrie says to me, my goodness, what a dreadful name, why do they call it that? And I tell her that it’s because a man named Bridegroom used to own it who’s been dead a hundred years. And she says to him with a kind of little shiver that she doesn’t like the sound of it, but he only laughs, and says what difference does it make. And he says thanks to me, they might try it, and after they have had their supper and are ready to go on, should they keep going up that road and find some other road off it to get them to Vermont, or should they come on back? And I said there’s no road off it at all except the Swamp Road, about ten miles along, that all the swamp-rat Flails that is three-quarters Indian has always lived on, that twenty or thirty years ago used to raise so much hell, though there isn’t any more of them left except John Flail now, with Two-finger Pete in the pen for murder and the rest of them all dead, and the Swamp Road didn’t go nowhere, anyway, except to the old sawmill. And it was nineteen miles, or maybe twenty-one, to get on Route 49A at Stony Falls, and it’s a bumpy stony road that’s punishing on tires, and nobody ever takes it except the people that live on it, and them not too much; and him and his lady had better come back to Route 7 here and keep on it. And he says thanks again, they’ll come back after they have had their picnic; and Miss Darrie here smiles at me, and they back and turn around, and go back down to the Stony Falls road a couple of hundred feet, and go on up it.

  Q. You have given your conversation with Mr. St. Erme in great detail, Mr. Quelch, and I thank you for it. I am sure that you gave him complete directions. The question, however, is about this man who was with him and Miss Darrie—this tramp. You saw him in the back of the car, while they were stopped there at the post office?

  A. Yes. I couldn’t help but see him. They were stopped there, talking to me, about eight minutes and a half, more or less. I saw him setting in the back seat. I didn’t look at him so closely, maybe. I was looking more at Miss Darrie setting at the wheel, she looked so young and pretty, she was pretty enough to be a pin-up girl, she was pretty enough to eat. More than him particularly. I didn’t pay any particular attention to him, except that he must have been a hitchhiker they had picked up. I did notice he was wearing a coat with big black and white squares, and a light-blue hat with its brim cut sawtooth all around, and he looked unshove and dirty; and his eyes were red and he had sharp pointed teeth. But I didn’t notice how tall or short he was, setting down. He did have kind of long dry-looking reddish hair, come to think of it.

  Q. What do you mean by red? Like Dr. Riddle’s here?

  A. Well, more auburn, maybe. More pinkish brown, with some gray in it, not so dark red quite.

  Q. Could it have been a wig?

  A. They make wigs better than that. I used to do some barbering over in Hartford, and I’ve seen some of these toupees and wigs they make so good I’ve snipped my shears to start to cut ’em, when a man sat down, before they took them off. This fellow’s hair was awful rough cut, like he had done it in a mirror with a paring knife. No fellow would wear a wig like that.

  Q. Did y
ou notice his torn left ear, which Miss Darrie has described?

  A. He was setting with his right side to me. He was kind of holding and pulling at his left ear, I think, now that you mention it. Maybe it was tore, but I didn’t see it.

  Q. Do you remember what his voice sounded like?

  A. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there in the back among the groceries.

  Q. Have you seen him again since? I want you to think carefully before you answer me.

  [Mr. Ouelch, after deliberation, and after surveying a person present, states that he does not believe so.]

  Q. [To Dr. Riddle] And you have not seen him since, either, Doctor?

  A. I have never seen him at all.

  He must have been real. He had an existence. Not merely she and St. Erme saw him, and Postmaster Ouelch, but everyone else along the road from Dead Bridegroom’s Pond as he raced in his crazy getaway.

  There is old Hinterzee, gnarled and bow-legged, with his broken nose.

  Q. [To Mr. Hinterzee] You were homeward-bound from the Whippleville post office up the Stony Falls road about a quarter of eight, and this gray car overtook you and passed you, Mr. Hinterzee, with Miss Darrie driving and Mr. St. Erme in front beside her, and this Doc, or Corkscrew, in the rear seat?

  A. Yah.

  Q. Miss Darrie has stated that she did not see anyone on the road.

  A. I was down in ditch beside road. Tall grasses, I was looking for half dollar I lose last spring. Always when I go by, I stop and look for it. But I see them, yah. They go by.

  Q. Describe this man we are referring to as Corkscrew.

  A. He has black and white coat, funny cut blue hat, dirty face.

  Q. A torn left ear?

  A. I did not see. I was on right side of road.

  Q. And you saw the car again, about ten or fifteen minutes later, and saw Miss Darrie and Mr. St. Erme and him, about half a mile further along, where it had parked off the road beside the woods leading down to Dead Bridegroom’s Pond? And Miss Darrie and Mr. St. Erme had got out of it and were going down through the woods toward the lake, and you saw Corkscrew slipping out of it and slipping down through the woods after them?

  A. Yah.

  Q. Describe how he was going after them, in your own words.

  A. He was going creepy.

  Q. Can you illustrate?

  [Mr. Hinterzee crouches, makes a demonstration of a man stalking, lifting his feet carefully, parting bushes, with shoulders hunched.]

  Q. Did he have a knife in his hand? A bread knife?

  A. I did not see.

  Q. What did you see?

  A. They just going down through woods to lake, maybe have swim, maybe pick wild flowers. I see her white coat and his Panama down through trees. This fellow goes creeping after them. I go on.

  Q. And you saw him again about forty minutes later, after you had reached your home, and were sitting on your front porch beside the road? He was driving the car, with Mr. St. Erme sitting slumped beside him with his head on the car door, one arm dangling overside, and Miss Darrie was no longer with them? And as he passed he howled his horn and laughed?

  A. Yah.

  Q. What did he laugh like?

  A. Like a horse.

  Q. Can you illustrate?

  [Mr. Hinterzee puts his head sideways on his shoulder and utters a loud whinnying sound.]

  A. Like that.

  Q. What did you do?

  A. I look at him. He is one crazy fellow.

  Q. And Mr. St. Erme beside him did not move?

  A. His arm moved. Swinging. Over the side of the door. His head on the car door maybe bounce, going over the bumps. The car goes by fast.

  Q. [By Dr. Riddle] Excuse me, Lieutenant. His right arm, Mr. Hinterzee?

  A. He was on the right side, yah. His right arm, it must have been.

  Q. [By Di. Riddle] And he had a hand at the end of it?

  A. I did not see. But yah. He must have. If he did not have, I see....

  That is it. Hinterzee did not notice whether St. Erme had a right hand. But if he had not had one, Hinterzee would have noticed. It is the abnormal item which sticks out. There was nothing abnormal about St. Erme in appearance. There was nothing wrong whatever with his right hand.

  There he was. He lured them to stop and pick him up by the display of a dead mangled kitten, by some bird-charming power in his red eyes, by some hypnotic soothing quality in his soft quiet voice.

  He got in and rode with them, looking at the scenery. He quoted Latin, and he pinched his ear.

  When they stopped on the lonely road and went down to the lake shore, to examine it as a picnic site before bringing down their provisions, he followed them. For what? Merely to spy on them obscenely, out of a low-witted pleasure in watching people unaware, like the unknown man with the field glasses in the second-floor apartment across from her, at 511 West? To murder them down there now, and sink their bodies in the lake with stones?

  St. Erme had acted like a man in a dream up to that moment, so far as concerned everything about Corkscrew. And even she, though uneasy over him at the beginning, seems for a while to have been half bewitched. They can’t be blamed for that. Until he has been seen, it can’t be understood. Some mesmerizing quality in him. Some power of suggestion.

  Whatever his purpose with them was, he didn’t have opportunity to attack them then and there. Down there by the black waters of the lake, in the twilight in the silent woods, with a horror impending. Suddenly, with death so near to her, she saw him peering down above her, and she screamed. And St. Erme awoke out of his hypnosis, out of his deadly dream.

  Suddenly the spell was shattered by her scream. Suddenly St. Erme must have realized, however inadequately, that that negligible, contemptible, dirty, sawed-off little man was more than he seemed. Suddenly must have seen him as more than just a witless tramp—as a man with a keen and terrible brain behind his little red eyes. Suddenly must have been aware, however incoherently and incompletely, that this apparently harmless man whom he had let himself be lulled by, in his lordly condescension, was dangerous. Was the most dangerous man to him that he had ever met in the whole world.

  But not enough. St. Erme didn’t realize it quite enough. Not with a mortal dry-mouthed fear in him, for his own life, and for the girl’s that he loved. Rather, he was enraged, with a lordly anger. Lordly, he pursued that red-eyed, cunning, dangerous little man. To rattle his bones, to beat the hell out of him, showing off his male courage, proud of his strength. And Corkscrew lured him back up toward the car, with the trick of the broken partridge wing.

  The car keys are the answer to what he wanted, it can be hypothesized, in lack of any definite knowledge. St. Erme had taken charge of the keys again when he and Elinor had got out, as he had at the bank, and at their stops for lunch and in Danbury, with a pocket to slip them into. Corkscrew had seen him removing them, of course; but perhaps had not been sure whether he had pocketed them, or had dropped them for hiding in the grass beside the car.

  Or perhaps it was the knife that he ran back to get. He flees back to the car, springs into it, and snatches up the knife. With it in hand, crouching on the seat, he turns, as St. Erme, hard after him, opens the ear door to haul him out. With his red eyes, with his fanged grin, having now the advantage of height. And St. Erme, weaponless, lunges in to get him. With an angry bellow that turns to a scream.

  He has the car keys now, Corkscrew. Out of St. Erme’s pocket, if they were there. Or from the grass where St. Erme had dropped them—St. Erme having indicated by an involuntary glance of his eyes, at the demand, where they were hidden. He has St. Erme’s money, too, those fifty crisp fifty-dollar bills which St. Erme drew at the bank this morning, that money which he may have carelessly displayed in Danbury, in the dark little ice-cream parlor or the grocery or the ten-cent store. He has everything. The thing is done.

  But there is still the girl. He had better silence her, so she doesn’t raise the alarm. He goes down swiftly after her where he
last saw her. But she has left the lake. He comes back swiftly, calling her in a muffled, disguised voice, crudely attempting to imitate St. Erme’s tones, using the names that he has heard St. Erme use to her.

  “Elinor! Sweet!”

  But at the same time swearing with an uncontrolled blasphemy, with a low flood of obscenities which St. Erme never knew. Not knowing that she is so near, that she can glimpse and hear him.

  He finds her coat where she has abandoned it. She is hiding from him, she knows what he has done. Through the twilight woods he stalks her, silently, terribly, wasting no more breath.

  Stalking her. With the knife. With his glaring eyes, beneath his saw-tooth hat, which seem—in a moment when they turn toward her, as he goes past—in the twilight now all ice and pale. And she lies hidden, with blood like ice. She creeps away. She lies hidden without a breath.

  He can waste no more time with her. He must give it up. He goes back to the car, gets into it, and drives off, not pausing to dump St. Erme’s body out, speeding up the road, away....

  An ordinary hitchhiker, thumbing by the roadside. A stolen car, and stolen luggage and money, with murder as an incident. A tedious, an ordinary story to the police. Every year, in almost every state.

  But from the beginning Rosenblatt was not quite satisfied, I think. And I have a feeling, myself as well, that St. Erme’s murder, and hers, also, were planned long ago.

  There were she and St. Erme who saw him and heard him speak; there were Postmaster Quelch and old Hinterzee who saw him, more or less at length.

  There was John Wiggins the beekeeper and his family, two miles on from Hinterzee’s, who saw him— the Wigginses, whose big friendly St. Bernard dog he deliberately veered and struck, with malignant sadism, as it stood wagging its tail sluggishly beside the road, in sight of all of them, and then went speeding on, while Wiggins and his wife and their six children ran out and gathered the dying dog into their arms, with tear-blind eyes and breaking breasts, poor simple people, not knowing that there could be a fiend like him in all God’s quiet simple world.