by Otto Penzler
“I killed him,” she mourned.
“It wasn’t you alone,” the lieutenant acknowledged bitterly as she was led from the room. “We all did.”
They seated Donny Blake in a chair, after she had gone, and one of them stood directly behind it like a mentor. They handed this man a newspaper and he opened it and held it spread out before Blake’s face, as though he were holding it up for him to read.
The door opened and closed, and Storm, the chartered accountant, was sitting there across the room, in the exact place the Novak woman had been just now.
He looked around at them questioningly, still unsure of just why he had been summoned here. All he saw was a group of detectives, one of them buried behind a newspaper.
“Keep looking where that newspaper is,” the lieutenant instructed quietly.
Storm looked puzzled, but he did.
The detective behind the chair slowly began to raise it, like a curtain. Blake’s chin peered below first. Then his mouth. Then nose, eyes, forehead. At last his whole face was revealed.
Storm’s own face whitened. His reaction was quieter than the woman’s had been, but just as dramatic. He began to tremble right as he sat there in the chair; they could see it by his hands mostly. “Oh my God,” he mouthed in a sickened undertone.
“Have you anything to say?” the lieutenant urged. “Don’t be afraid to say it.”
He stroked his mouth as though the words tasted rotten even before they’d come out. “That’s—that’s the face of the man I collided with—on Farragut Street.”
“You’re sure?”
His figures came back to him, but you could tell they gave him no comfort any longer. “One hundred percent!” he said dismally, leaning way over his own lap as though he had a cramp.
“They’re not altogether to blame,” the lieutenant commented to a couple of his men after the room had been cleared. “It’s very hard, when a guy looks a good deal like another, not to bridge the remaining gap with your own imagination and supply the rest. Another thing, the mere fact that we were already holding Severn in custody would unconsciously influence them in identifying him. We thought he was the guy, and we ought to know, so if we thought he was, he probably was. I don’t mean they consciously thought of it in that way, but without their realizing it, that would be the effect it would have on their minds.”
A cop looked in, said: “They’ve got Blake ready for you, lieutenant.”
“And I’m ready for him,” the lieutenant answered grimly, turning and leading the way out.
The doctor came forward, tipped up one of Blake’s eyelids. Sightless white showed. He took out a stethoscope and applied it to the region of the heart.
In the silence their panting breaths reverberated hollowly against the basement walls.
The doctor straightened up, removed the stethoscope. “Not very much more,” he warned in a guarded undertone. “Still okay, but he’s wearing down. This is just a faint. You want him back?”
“Yeah,” one of the men said. “We wouldn’t mind.”
The doctor extracted a small vial from his kit, extended it toward the outsize, discolored mass that was Blake’s nose. He passed it back and forth in a straight line a couple of times.
Blake’s eyelids flickered up. Then he twitched his head away uncomfortably.
There was a concerted forward shift on the part of all of them, like a pack of dogs closing in on a bone.
“Wait’ll the doc gets out of the room,” the lieutenant checked them. “This is our own business.”
Donny Blake began to weep. “No, I can’t stand any more. Doc,” he called out frantically, “Doc! Don’t leave me in here with ‘em! They’re killing me—!”
The doctor had scant sympathy for him. “Then why don’t you tell ‘em what they want to know?” he grunted. “Why waste everyone’s time?” He closed the door after him.
Maybe because the suggestion came from an outsider, at least someone distinct from his tormentors. Or maybe because this was the time for it anyway.
Suddenly he said, “Yeah, it was me. I did. I was with Gates and the two of us killed this guy O’Neill. He horned in on us in the middle of this uncut diamond job we were pulling. He didn’t see me. I came up behind him while he was holding Gates at the point of his gun. I pinned him to the wall there in the entrance and we took his gun away from him. Then Gates said, “He’s seen us now,” and he’d shot him down before I could stop him. I said, “He’s still alive, he’ll tell anyway,” and I finished him off with one into the head.”
He covered his face with palsied hands. “Now I’ve given it to you. Don’t hurt me any more. Lemme alone.”
“See who that is,” the lieutenant said.
A cop was on the other side of the door when it had been opened. “The D.A.’s Office is on the phone for you, lieutenant. Upstairs in your own office.”
“Get the stenographer,” the lieutenant said, “I’ll be right back.”
He was gone a considerable time, but he must have used up most of it on the slow, lifeless way he came back. Dawdling along. He came in with a funny look on his face, as though he didn’t see any of them any more. Or rather, did, but hated to have to look at them.
“Take him out,” he said curtly.
No one said anything until the prisoner was gone. Then they all looked at the lieutenant curiously, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t.
“Aren’t you going to have it taken down, lieutenant, while it’s still flowing free and easy?”
“No,” the lieutenant said, tight-lipped.
“But he’ll seal up again, if we give him time to rest—”
“We’re not going to have a chance to use it, so there’s no need getting it out of him.” He sank deflatedly onto the chair the prisoner had just been propped in. “He’s not going to be brought to trail. Those are the orders I just got. The D.A.’s Office says to turn him loose.”
He let the commotion eddy unheard above his head for a while.
Finally someone asked bitterly, “What is it, politics?”
“No. Not altogether, anyway. It’s true it’s an election year, and they may play a part, but there’s a lot more involved than just that. Here’s how they lined it up to me. Severn has been executed for that crime. There’s no way of bringing him back again. The mistake’s been made, and it’s irretrievable. To bring this guy to trial now will unleash a scandal that will affect not only the D.A.’s Office, but the whole Police Department. It’s not only their own skins, or ours, they’re thinking of. It’s the confidence of the public. It’ll get a shock that it won’t recover from for years to come. I guess they feel they would rather have one guilty criminal walk out scot-free than bring about a condition where, for the next few years, every time the law tries to execute a criminal in this State, there’ll be a hue and cry raised that it’s another miscarriage of justice like the Severn case. They won’t be able to get any convictions in our courts. All a smart defense lawyer will have to do is mention the name of Severn, and the jury will automatically acquit the defendant, rather than take a chance. It’s a case of letting one criminal go now, or losing dozens of others in the future.” He got up with a sigh. “I’ve got to go up now and get him to sign a waiver.”
The handful of men stood around for a minute or two longer. Each one reacted to it according to his own individual temperament. One, of a practical turn of mind, shrugged it off, said: “Well, it’s not up to us—Only I wish they’d told us before we put in all that hard work on him. Coming, Joe?”
Another, of a legalistic turn of mind, began to point out just why the D.A.’s Office had all the wrong dope. Another, of a clannish turn of mind, admitted openly: “I wouldn’t have felt so sore, if only it hadn’t happened to be a police sergeant.”
One by one they drifted out. Until there was just one left behind. The detective named Rogers. He stayed on down there alone after all the rest had gone. Hands cupped in pockets, staring down at the floor, while he stood motionle
ss.
His turn of mind? That of a zealot who has just seen his cause betrayed. That of a true believer who has just seen his scripture made a mockery of.
They met in the main corridor at Headquarters a few hours later, the detective and the murderer who was already a free man, immune, on his way back to the outer world.
Rogers just stood there against the wall as he went by. His head slowly turned, pacing the other’s passage as their paths crossed. Not a word was exchanged between them. Blake had a strip of plaster along-side his nose, another dab of it under his lip. But Gary Severn was dead in the ground. And so was Police Sergeant O’Neill.
And the little things about him hurt even worse. The untrammelled swing of his arms. The fastidious pinch he was giving his necktie-knot. He was back in life again, full-blast, and the knot of his necktie mattered again.
He met the detective’s eyes arrogantly, turning his own head to maintain the stare between them unbroken. Then he gave a derisive chuckle deep in his throat. It was more eloquent, more insulting than any number of words could have been. “Hagh!” It meant “The police—hagh! Their laws and regulations—hagh! Murder—hagh!”
It was like a blow in the face. It smarted. It stang. It hurt Rogers where his beliefs lay. His sense of right and wrong. His sense of justice. All those things that people—some of them anyway—have, and don’t let on they have.
Roger’s face got white. Not all over. Just around the mouth and chin. The other man went on. Along the short remainder of the corridor, and out through the glass doors, and down the steps out of sight. Rogers stood there without moving, and his eyes followed him to the bitter end, until he was gone, there wasn’t anything left to look at any more.
He’d never be back here again. He’d never be brought back to answer for that one particular crime.
Rogers turned and went swiftly down the other way. He came to a door, his lieutenant’s door, and he pushed it open without knocking and went in. He put his hand down flat on the desk, then he took it away again.
The lieutenant looked down at the badge left lying there, then up at him.
“My written resignation will follow later. I’m quitting the force.” He turned and went back to the door again.
“Rogers, come back here. Now wait a minute—You must be crazy.”
“Maybe I am a little, at that,” Rogers admitted.
“Come back here, will you? Where you going?”
“Wherever Blake is, that’s where I’ll be from now on. Wherever he goes, that’s where you’ll find me.” The door ebbed closed, and he was gone.
“Which way’d he go?” he said to a cop out on the front steps.
“He walked down a ways, and then he got in a cab, down there by the corner. There it is, you can still see it up ahead there, waiting for that light to change—”
Rogers hoisted his arm to bring over another, and got in.
“Where to, cap?”
“See that cab, crossing the intersection up there ahead? Just go which ever way that goes, from now on.”
Blake left the blonde at the desk and came slowly and purposefully across the lobby toward the overstuffed chair into which Rogers had just sunk down. He stopped squarely in front of him, legs slightly astraddle. “Why don’t you get wise to yourself? Was the show good? Was the rest’runt good? Maybe you think I don’t know your face from that rat-incubator downtown. Maybe you think I haven’t seen you all night long, everyplace where I was.”
Rogers answered quietly, looking up at him. “What makes you think I’ve been trying for you not to see me?”
Blake was at a loss for a minute. He opened his mouth, closed it again, swallowed. “You can’t get me on that O’Neill thing. You guys wouldn’t have let me go in the first place, if you could have held me on it, and you know it! It’s finished, water under the bridge.”
Rogers said as quietly, as readily as ever, “I know I can’t. I agree with you there. What makes you think I’m trying to?”
Again Blake opened and closed his mouth abortively. The best answer he could find was, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but you won’t get anywhere.”
“What makes you think I’m trying to get anywhere?”
Blake blinked and looked at a loss. After an awkward moment, having been balked of the opposition he’d expected to meet, he turned on his heel and went back to the desk.
He conferred with the blonde for a few minutes. She began to draw away from him. Finally she shrugged off the importuning hand he tried to lay on her arm. Her voice rose. “Not if you’re being shadowed—count me out! I ain’t going to get mixed up with you. You should have told me sooner. You better find somebody else to go around with!” She turned around and flounced indignantly out.
Blake gave Rogers the venomous look of a beady-eyed cobra. Then he strode ragingly off in the opposite direction, entered the waiting elevator.
Rogers motioned languidly to the operator to wait for him, straightened up from his chair, ambled leisurely over, and stepped in in turn. The car started up with the two of them in it. Blake’s face was livid with rage. A pulse at his temple kept beating a tattoo.
“Keep it up,” he said in a strangled undertone behind the operator’s back.
“Keep what up?” answered Rogers impassively.
The car stopped at the sixth and Blake flung himself off. The door closed behind him. He made a turn of the carpeted corridor, stopped, put his key into a door. Then he whirled savagely as a second padded tread came down the corridor in the wake of his own.
“What d’ye think you’re going to do,” he shrilled exasperatedly, “come right inside my room with me?”
“No,” Rogers said evenly, putting a key to the door directly opposite, “I’m going into my own room.”
The two doors closed one after the other.
That was at midnight, on the sixth floor of the Congress Hotel. When Blake opened the door of his room at ten the next morning, all freshly combed and shaven, to go down to breakfast, it was on the tenth floor of the Hotel Colton. He’d changed abodes in the middle of the night. As he came out he was smiling to himself behind the hand he traced lightly over the lower part of his face to test the efficacy of his recent shave.
He closed the door and moved down the corridor toward the elevator.
The second door down from his own, on the same side, opened a moment or two after he’d gone by, before he’d quite reached the turn of the hall. Something made him glance back. Some lack of completion, maybe the fact that it hadn’t immediately closed again on the occupant’s departure as it should have.
Rogers was standing sidewise in it, back to door-frame, looking out after him while he unhurriedly completed hitching on his coat.
“Hold the car for me a sec, will you?” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m on my way down to breakfast myself.”
On the third try he managed to bring the cup up to its highest level yet, within an inch of his lips, but he still couldn’t seem to manage that remaining inch. The cup started to vibrate with the uncontrollable vibration of the wrist that supported it, slosh over at the sides. Finally it sank heavily down again, with a crack that nearly broke the saucer under it, as though it were too heavy for him to hold. Its contents splashed up.
Rogers, sitting facing him from a distance of two tables away, but in a straight line, went ahead enjoyably and calmly mangling a large dish of bacon and eggs. He grinned through a full mouth, while his jaws continued inexorably to rotate with a sort of traction movement.
Blake’s wrists continued to tremble, even without the cup to support. “I can’t stand it,” he muttered, shading his eyes for a minute. “Does that man have to—?” Then he checked the remark.
The waiter, mopping up the place before him, let his eye travel around the room without understanding. “Is there something in here that bothers you, sir?”
“Yes,” Blake said in a choked voice, “there is.”
“Would you care to sit this way, sir?”
Blake got up and moved around to the opposite side of the table, with his back to Rogers. The waiter refilled his cup.
He started to lift it again, using both hands this time to make sure of keeping it steady.
The peculiar crackling, grating sound caused by a person chomping on dry toast reached him from the direction in which he had last seen Rogers. It continued incessantly after that, without a pause, as though the consumer had no sooner completed one mouthful of the highly audible stuff than he filled up another and went to work on that.
The cup sank down heavily, as if it weighed too much to support even in his double grasp. This time it overturned, a tan puddle overspread the table. Blake leaped to his feet, flung his napkin down, elbowed the solicitous waiter aside.
“Lemme out of here,” he panted. “I can still feel him, every move I make, watching me, watching me from behind—!”
The waiter looked around, perplexed. To his eyes there was no one in sight but a quiet, inoffensive man a couple of tables off, minding his own business, strictly attending to what was on the plate before him, not doing anything to disturb anyone.
“Gee, you better see a doctor, mister,” he suggested worriedly. “You haven’t been able to sit through a meal in days now.”
Blake floundered out of the dining room, across the lobby, and into the drugstore on the opposite side. He drew up short at the fountain, leaned helplessly against it with a haggard look on his face.
“Gimme an aspirin!” His voice frayed. “Two of them, three of them!”
“Century Limited, ‘Ca-a-awgo, Track Twenty-five!” boomed dismally through the vaulted rotunda. It filtered in, thinned a little through the crack in the telephone-booth panel that Blake was holding fractionally ajar, both for purposes of ventilation and to be able to hear the despatch when it came.
Even now that he had come, he stayed in the booth and the phone stayed on the hook. He’d picked the booth for its strategic location. It not only commanded the clock out there, more important still it commanded the wicket leading down to that particular track that he was to use, and above all, the prospective passengers who filed through it.