Tuxedo Johnny felt his stomach muscles knot. There was something inexplicably dismal about that window. Like a great rectangular inhuman eye. Like the blank face of nothing. Like the shape of a grave that is filled with dark earth and a dark water.
With dry lips and knotted muscles he stared.
'How does it look, Johnny?' said Big Bat.
'Empty window across, Bat,' Tuxedo Johnny said, taking a quiet breath. 'He was small enough to squirm out the one here, that's all. He crossed over on a ladder or a board. The precinct boys played it dumb, too. They didn't even step up and look out. He may have been still crawling across it when they got here. But that's the way he did it.'
Big Bat stepped up on one light balled foot beside him. Tuxedo Johnny bent his head aside for Bat to get the picture, too.
'Empty window,' mused Big Bat, rubbing his chin, staring with emerald eyes. 'A ladder or a board. A little catlike man, or a long thin man with eel hips and rubber bones.
'Yes, that's got it, Johnny. He hid behind the door or shower curtain in the bathroom while you were stumbling in and finding her. When you blew the lamp that he had fixed, and went running out again, he stepped out, quick and cool. My God, I take off my hat to him. He thought of everything. He even closed the window part way behind him, to look just natural—a panic stricken man would have left it open, or would have closed it all the way. And across and in through the window of that empty room, pulling his plank in after him. Then out a deserted flat and down the stairs, and out the entrance next door, while we had the building here surrounded. It's the way he must have done it. It's the only way.'
He stepped down to the floor again, did Big Bat, a little heavily.
'Get hold of Jorgensen,' he said to the plainclothesman in the bedroom. 'Find out if Paul Bean has come back to his apartment yet. If they've traced where Father Finley moved to when he moved out of that dump over in Hell's Kitchen where he was living with all his cats up to a month ago.'
One of the fingerprint men had come into the bedroom to report. 'We've got the story on the murder weapons, inspector. A's prints are on the neck of the bottle and some of the broken pieces. Smeared over. Dan's and B's prints are on the razor. Smeared over. No prints on the poker except bloody smudges.'
'A was Paul Bean, of course,' said Big Bat wearily. 'He brought the champagne bottle, this bird Boaz says. B was Finley. He came in and got a shave. And one of them, at least, has an alibi that's wonderful and good. Unless there was a living witness.
'Okay, he played it smart. As smart as hell. It happened after he had gone. It was some other guy. He was so damned innocent he even left his prints on one of the murder weapons. Before he put on the bandages or the gloves. And there's no way short of hell of telling from the prints which one he was . . . Here's a cake of soap and a towel to give the boys, Fulheimer. But they won't get any prints from them. He probably even washed his hands in gloves, he was that smart. We've found the way he got away, anyway. If that does us any good.'
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe gave a last glance at that bare dirty window opposite, before stepping down.
By every look, the room back of it was unoccupied, and had been unoccupied for months, and perhaps years. As empty as the grave. Or more so. Yet as he gave his final glance now, he thought he saw a pallid face looming slowly into view in the depths of darkness back of the glass.
Tuxedo Johnny paused upon one foot, staring, with knotted stomach muscles. It was a face—an apelike ghostly face, with a wide grinning mouth, with jug like ears, with a pair of great moist glistening eyes like the eyes of a lemur. The face swam toward the dirty window pane, staring back at him as he stared out.
The dim face gibbered, grimacing at him. It twisted up in a hideous, formless snarl. It stretched its mouth and twitched its ears. It mocked him, laughing hideously.
'In the name—' Tuxedo Johnny whispered, with his knees like water beneath him.
'What have you got there, Johnny?'
Big Bat O'Brien sprang up beside him again, staring forth, but the leering face had vanished. There was only the blank glass across, dirty and bare.
It had been only an illusion of his febrile and excited brain, Tuxedo Johnny told himself. A phantasm of his racing heart.
'See anyone over there still, Johnny?' Big Bat repeated.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe drew a deep quiet breath. 'No,' he said. 'No one, Bat.'
He could not confess having seen that phantasm to Big Bat. He stepped down to the floor again. Yet even in hell he would remember the look of that gibbering, mocking face behind the dingy window across the black alley.
* * *
Kerry Ott, who knew a scene when he saw one, never saw that murder scene. He was never on it. He had not known that there had been murder.
The lights behind the shaded living room windows, down at the back of that apartment across from him, which had gone out when he had been looking forth a few minutes after midnight, had not told him that it was murder. The shadow show upon the wall, the two dark bulks of hurrying Keystone Cops down the black alley, the light which had flashed on behind that frosted little bathroom window opposite, with the glimpse of hand and bare arm he had seen, had had nothing in them of murder.
He did rot know that he had had a kind of fluoroscopic glimpse into a murder apartment during a brief period of time while its front door was chained and its rear window was locked, and that he was the only person alive who had had such a glimpse. He did not even hear that girl's mortal scream, within twenty feet of him, when it sounded, though he was even nearer to it in feet than Slipsky and Tuxedo Johnny, and though people five hundred feet away, and down on the next street, heard it.
How long he had been lying on his cot Kerry didn't know. His tired and overstrained mind had been racing with his play . . . Still he must have been asleep, for a brief time, anyway. Something had brought him back into the world of reality in which all men must live, into the world of silence where he always lived, the world of darkness where he was lying now.
Had he felt the faint jar of a footstep on the worn floor? A door latch click, a window going up? Sounds that he could never hear. He lay with eyes open. The molecular corpuscles of the darkness swam before his eyes like the eyes of deep sea fishes. All the darkness was filled with nothing. With dark grey eyes of nothingness, which floated, and drifted, and paused to stare, and swam on by.
The room was impalpably lighter than when he had lain down. It was still black, but not with an utter blackness. The kind of blackness from which the adage comes, that all cats are grey at night.
His window shade was up—that was it. It could have snapped up, with a worn roller catch, and its jerk could have awakened him. The windows of the apartment across the alley must be lighted now— though he could not see them where he was, recumbent at the back of his room—since a certain amount of dim light came in his window from across.
He lay motionless, watching. Against the dingy lustre of the pane he saw the shadow of the spider, moving and weaving. No living thing jug eared boys, in loud sport coats and baggy pants, with red hair and freckled necks.
'Woooo!' He sent a bloodhound howl after them.
Sheer heedless panic had hold of them—for a few moments more, flight by flight, the ancient building seemed to vibrate to their headlong frantic descent. They must have reached the front door then, and out into the night.
Kerry Ott had halted at the doorway of his flat. He couldn't catch them, and if he could, he didn't think they would be good to eat. He put his palms upon his naked chest and rubbed his pectoral muscles meditatively, with a grim mouth.
He glanced down towards the end of the corridor, where there was a ladder going up to a trapdoor to the roof. The trapdoor was open—he had thought so. They had probably been that pair of heat standing, nose thumbing, jitterbugging shadows which he had watched on the side wall across the alley, when he had been looking out a little after midnight, just above the dim shadow line cast by the roof parapet of Argyll Hall, b
eneath the shadow of the long clothesline which was stretched above. Tossing a beanbag back and forth, and all of that. Though maybe it hadn't been a beanbag they had been tossing, but a dead cat.
Funny—but not too damned funny. Unpleasant little hellions. Probably spying from his window on someone they knew in the apartment across, just for the hell of it. Peeping toms, and junior members of the thugs' union in good standing. That had been a vicious bite on the hand that one of them had given him. A filthy punch in the kidneys, the other. He could still feel it.
They had probably used the flat at other times, he thought. They had seemed to know their way around. He remembered a bunch of trashy pictures and a couple of empty whisky pints which he had found in the kitchen when he took the place. There wasn't any lock on the door. Anyone could come in.
That pair would be telling each other about the moaning ghost in the haunted flat on the top floor of Argyll Hall for a long time to come, he had the feeling. They wouldn't be back again. Still he didn't like to be disturbed. He had better get a bolt for the door tomorrow, if he wasn't finished with his play and out by then.
He fumbled with the latch mechanism before closing the door, to see if there was any way to make it catch. He noticed something flat and black lying on the worn dirty floor of the railroad hall back of him, about five feet in from the door. He stepped towards it and picked it up, examining it in the light from the hall. It was a man's black morocco purse, with gold corners, which didn't belong to him, and which he had never seen before.
It was stamped, 'P. O. B.' There was no money in it, but there was a draft identification, a driving licence, and various cards: 'Paul O. Bean, Bean, Halsey, Pardee & Bean, Counsellors at Law, 50 Exchange Place'—'Mr. Paul Ormond Bean, Six Hundred Ninety-nine Park Avenue.' He stuck it in the hip pocket of his pants. He would phone Mr. Bean tomorrow that he had found his purse in his flat. Or perhaps just mail it to him.
He closed the rickety front door, having found no way to secure the latch. In his sock feet he felt his way back down the long black railroad corridor towards his room. He had reached the doorway of it before he became conscious of that faint catty and meaty odour again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Cat Man
He had noticed when he awoke a vague catty smell somewhere in the darkness and the odour of shag tobacco. He didn't smoke himself. He was sensitive to it. With his senses of smell and touch and sight which had always to be a little keener and more keyed up because of the silence in which he dwelt.
He paused in the doorway. Against the dingy pane across the room he saw the silhouette of a small grey figure stepping down to the floor with cat lightness. Still outlined against the window it came vaguely towards him. There was some gesture it was making—of pulling off gloves, he thought.
He had an idea that he was being seen, though he could not see more than that vague approaching outline. The air stirred a moment as a voice purred at him. Or was it his imagination? Very small and soft.
'I'm deaf,' he said. 'I can't talk in the dark. If you'll just stay where you are, I'll find a light.'
He advanced. The vague figure stepped aside, became invisible, no longer outlined against the dingy window. Just for an instant he had a feel of silk.
He reached his writing table beside the window, feeling the crumpled balls of paper crunch beneath his shoeless feet. He found the hanging bulb and turned it on. Looking over his shoulder mildly, he pulled down the window shade.
'What did you say?' he said.
A small grey man in stiff black straw hat and grey silky clerical attire stood apologetically in the centre of the room. His shoulders were hunched. There was something bulging in one of his pockets, which sagged his thin coat down. Delicately and carefully he continued pulling off his grey silk gloves, and stuffed them towards his other pocket. The gloves were rather soiled; Kerry saw a reddish stain at their fingertips, and a few small particles of some reddish stuff adhering to them, like flesh. Like hamburger. The little meek grey man's hands, however, were very white and clean.
'I am sorry, sir,' his lips moved vaguely. 'I didn't know anyone was in the flat.'
Kerry looked at his writing table with a mild frown. The little man had stepped down from it, he thought. There was a piece of crumpled wax paper on it, with some of those same tiny pieces of red meat. The top page of his script had a wrinkled and torn look, as if it had been stood or sat on. These signs of disturbance of his sacred desk were distinctly annoying. However, in face of the little man's vague look and soft humility, he forbore.
'I heard her crying, and came in,' said the little man in vague apology. 'I looked for her in the front room, but she wasn't there. It was all quite dusty and empty, sir. I didn't realize that anyone had moved in. Someone came out of the rooms down the hall, and turned on a light and went back to the kitchen, and ran water, and then came back again. Perhaps it was you, sir? I called out if they had seen a grey cat, but they did not reply.
'I came out of the front room and down the hall. I heard her then. She was playing with the papers in here on the floor. I could hear her rustling them I knocked, sir, but there was no answer. I came in, and asked you if you minded. You were lying on your cot and didn't answer. I didn't realize that you were deaf—I thought you were asleep. I don't see very well in the dark, unfortunately. Not half so well as they do, it seems. I found her playing underneath the table, and picked her up. Then those boys came bursting in, and I got up on the table with her out of their way, crouching back against the wall. I was really quite badly frightened. They are quite bad boys, really, Oscar and Willie. They do cruel things to cats. But they didn't see us, happily—most people, it seems, have extraordinarily blind eyes. I was quite relieved when you chased them away, sir. They would certainly have killed her if they found her. Isn't she a lovely thing?'
He had pulled forth a bundle of grey fur from his sagging pocket—a grey half grown kitten, with three white feet.
Its pink tongue yawned. Its belly was full and fat. He held it in the crook of his arm, while he fumbled for tobacco pouch and pipe, which he filled with a small delicate finger.
'I always carry a packet of meat for them,' he said in soft apology, striking a match on his thumbnail and lighting his pipe with little puffs. 'It's horrid stuff, and I can't stand the feel of it, but they love it. My name is Finley, by the way—Father Finley, or did I introduce myself? I live across the hall. I have quite a little family at present she makes twenty-three. Of course I don't keep them very long. When I have found a loving home, I give them away. Some day I hope you will drop in and visit us. Turn about's fair play.'
'That is kind of you,' said Kerry courteously, ushering the little silky grey man towards the door.
He went with Father Finley to the front door of the flat, and ushered him on out. Smoking his pipe, with his cat cradled in his arm, the little man wandered vaguely eater corner down the hall. Kerry fiddled with the broken lock another futile moment, then closed the door once more.
Back in his room, he saw one of the grey bloodstained gloves lying on the floor. The meek little man must have dropped it when he was stuffing them away. Kerry picked it up by the cuff edge, and deposited it in his bureau's empty bottom draw. He dropped Mr Paul Bean's purse in with it. He would return both items to their respective owners perhaps tomorrow, if the little grey man didn't come back for his glove before.
There was no likelihood that Mr. Bean knew where his purse was, of course, or would come for it.
He was thoroughly awake, now, and keyed up. The last act of his play, on which he was stalled, was organizing itself in his mind. He sat down, crumpling the waxed hamburger paper and throwing it to the floor. In his large firm and round black handwriting he began to write the last act.
Men and women moved before his eyes. He saw their entrances and their exits on a stage. He heard them speak. He heard even their most secret thoughts go round, behind the masks or grief or smug cold virtue on their faces ... He was launched a
gain in that timeless and speechless world of the imagination where no wall is impenetrable and no clock ticks, that free and unlimited world where everything is possible, because nothing ever was.
So it was, rapt in that immeasurable and unimmurable world, he was not aware of the men who entered.
ENTER (he wrote) THE MAN-HUNTERS, WITH STERN BLOODHOUND FACES
1st Manhunter: I thought the place was empty.
2nd Manhunter: Well, there's nothing invisible about this bird, anyway.
1st Manhunter: . . .
He was not aware of anyone standing just behind him, speaking to him. He didn't hear the good humoured, slightly bewildered voice. He didn't see the slightly baffled face. He was out of this world and out of all reality.
He wouldn't know till the hands fell on him.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe shook his head. 'Excuse me, brother,' he said. 'That must be damned interesting tripe, whatever you are writing. But there just happen to have been a couple of small murders committed across the alleyway from you within the past hour or less, and the killer just happens to have escaped through your room here. We'd like to have you tell us if you saw him.'
The big half naked man with the bland mild face sitting at the rickety old table in the dingy room here across the alley, beside the window whose shade had been pulled down, wrote on. Tuxedo Johnny looked with a helpless belly laugh towards Detecdves Jorgensen and Cark behind him.
'Out of this world,' he said. 'Anybody could have crawled right over him, and he wouldn't have known it. Maybe they did. Hey, brother! Wake up! It's murder!'
It was, Tuxedo Johnny was sure, the right room. He had come on into the empty rear flat with Cark and Jorgensen to locate the escape room and look it over, while Big Bat had delayed a moment, turning back to give a last look into Father Finley's cat filled front flat across the hall.
It had been an extraordinary break of luck, finding Finley vaguely wandering, grey and small and silky, with a grey cat on his arm, smoking his shaggy pipe, in the dim, mouldy hall. His place of residence hadn't been traced yet, and it would have been some time tomorrow at the least, and maybe several days, before the little unobtrusive man would otherwise have been located.
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