The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  That seemed to conclude the formalities for the time being, and he was taken into an adjoining building, which communicated with the first but where the floors were at a different level, and led into a cell, where he was asked if he would like a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  So many things had happened all night long that he hadn’t had time to notice until now whether he was hungry or not, but he remembered that Helen and he had had one of their usual scanty suppers, and it was now nearly his usual breakfast time, so he assented gladly.

  They were brought in to him, and they were excellent; the coffee was a much better quality than they could afford at the flat. They also provided him with a whole pack of cigarettes, without the usual obligation he felt under to ration himself on them for days on end. And the bunk, when he stretched out on it, was definitely no harder than that broken-down iron bedstead of theirs at home.

  The bus must be way out by now, way out beyond recall, he thought contentedly. He fell effortlessly into a deep tranquil sleep.

  “What’re they going to do to me now?” he asked, riding out to the re-enactment several hours later with four officials in the car around him, a second car following, and an escort of two motorcycle policemen.

  “Make you do it over in front of the cameras, so you can’t welsh out of it afterwards,” one of his escorts said in answer to his whispered question.

  When they finally arrived there, he was given terse instructions to do exactly as he had done Wednesday night, retrace his steps and repeat his movements. One of the detectives was to substitute for the vanished Ranger.

  Suddenly, as the ice-green lights flared up around him, he knew stage fright in its worst form. This was going to be far worse than the questioning last night at Headquarters had been; that, by comparison, had been confined to generalities; this permitted no slightest deviation.

  One of them passed him a hammer which had abruptly materialized from nowhere, but he accepted it unhesitatingly instead of shrinking away from it, and that, he could see, left them non-plussed once more. He thrust it absently into his inner coat-pocket, head-downward, as though it were no more than a fountain pen. He had to keep up the pretense a while longer, he reasoned. Suppose the messenger boy was followed; suppose they got his wife back before she settled the boy out there.… The screen test commenced. He “felt” his way along, step by step, mentally consulting the newspaper texts he had absorbed, like a cheating Latin student with a pony concealed behind his Caesar.

  The encounter with the synthetic Ranger was not particularly abhorrent to him; he certainly felt no qualms about it. It was mostly a matter of jockeying him into position so that he would fall in the right place. The papers had been accommodatingly explicit about this, even publishing diagrams marked with large X’s to keep their readers geographically informed.

  He saw them shake their heads slightly at his cold-blooded lack of emotion. Unfortunately, he swung the hammer in an entirely wrong arc, having no past experience in homicidal attacks, and when this was pointed out to him he nearly blew up altogether.

  “He must have turned the other way, I guess, to get away from me,” he said after a bad moment. “Everything gets blurred when you’re seeing red.”

  The crime safely on celluloid, as if to prove unarguably to everyone’s satisfaction that there had actually been one, he was whisked back down again downtown.

  In the afternoon he was taken over to the adjoining building again and made to confront a personable blond young woman seated in the midst of detectives and officials in one of the rooms over there.

  They looked at one another. There was, for a fleeting moment, an equally detached, impersonal curiosity on both sides. Then she quickly took refuge in a balled-up handkerchief at hand.

  “Is this the man you saw outside your house the night of the murder?”

  “Yes, that’s the man. I positively identify him.”

  She took a deep breath into her handkerchief, as though nerving herself for something she felt obliged to do but would have preferred not to. Then she jumped suddenly from her chair, ran out at him.

  “Why did you do it? Why did you take my husband from me?” she screamed tinnily. She made flailing motions toward his unprotected face; she was quickly restrained, drawn back by the men around her. But something had been faulty about the timing of the scene. She had had ample time to get in at least one good raking claw down his cheeks, and she hadn’t; she had just held her magenta-lacquered nails poised in clawing position, as if waiting for them to be restrained.

  “She’s not sore at me,” Swanson said to himself with sudden deep-seated inner conviction; “she’s glad he’s gone. She’s play-acting just as much as—I am.”

  And more than that, he even had a fleeting impression that she was afraid of him. Like someone is when you both know something that no one else does, and one of you is afraid the other will give it away.

  She was led out with her head stiffly averted, as though she couldn’t get away quickly enough. Well, the whole thing was too involved and deep for his mental processes to be able to cope with.

  The next day he had a visitor in his cell. He was a rather awe-inspiring man, with a short, neat graying beard and spectacles on a black cord.

  “I’m Markovitz,” he said bluntly. “I’ve been appointed by the state to defend you.” He rested a paternal hand on Swanson’s bony shoulder. “You should not have taken a life; you know that, don’t you? But I am going to do the best I can for you. We must be practical. In a case like this we must use whatever weapons are put into our hands.” He removed his glasses, polished them, pointed toward the hypnotized Swanson.

  “Insanity, of course,” he stated bluntly.

  His client sprang to his feet, stood there white to the gills, shaking from head to foot in a sudden ungovernable horror. Like many ignorant people, he had dreadful formalized visions of strait jackets, straw pallets, and clinking chains, in connection with mental derangement of any sort. “Oh, don’t do that to me!” he wailed. “Don’t! Don’t put me in one of those places, I’ll never get out alive again! I will go insane!”

  “You committed murder,” the lawyer reminded him coldly. He stood up. “I’ll petition to have you examined by alienists, as the first step toward entering a plea of insanity for you.” He left abruptly, all smiling encouragement.

  As soon as he was gone, Swanson began to rattle the bars desperately, to call the guard back again. The latter, when he finally came, was surprised to see this erstwhile phlegmatic, untroubled prisoner suddenly turned into a white-faced, panic-stricken hysteric.

  “Malloy,” he panted. “Oh, for the love of heaven, get me a piece of paper and a pencil right away, will you? I’ve got to send a wire!”

  And when the guard had acceded to his request, this is what he handed back to him through the cell grate:

  Mrs. Helen Swanson,

  c/o General Delivery,

  Tucson, Arizona.

  Come back right away, I’m in for bad trouble.

  Jerry.

  “Send this right off for me, will you, Malloy?” he pleaded.

  “What’s the matter, what’s come over you all of a sudden?” asked the guard, trying to calm him down. “Here, want to read the paper? Here’s today’s paper.” He thrust it through the bars at him, turned to go and get permission to file the message. He had hardly reached the end of the corridor when a deep groan sounded in the cell he had just left. He turned and went trotting back again.

  Swanson was sitting where he had left him, white as chalk and shaking uncontrollably from head to foot. The paper that he had just opened across his knees had fallen to the floor and he was staring with glazed, horrified eyes at the blank cell wall opposite him.

  The guard, alarmed, unlocked the grate and let himself in to find out what was the matter with him. He picked up the paper and read: “Seven Dead in Arizona Bus Crash.” And under that a list of casualties!

  Identified Dead

  _______________ />
  _______________

  Swanson, Mrs. Helen, of New York

  _______________

  The boy had escaped injury; his name was among the survivors. Swanson was on his feet, pawing pathetically at the guard’s uniform. “Lemme out of here! What am I doing in here now? My kid’s alone in the world. I’ve got to get out of here! I didn’t do it, I tell you, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it!”

  “Did you want to see me, Swanson?” the dick named Butler asked gruffly, as he entered the cell.

  “Any one of you fellows, I don’t care which one. They told me you were the most human of the lot; that’s why I asked for you.”

  “Most human, eh?” The detective grunted. “What was I supposed to be, chromium-plated? I feel a favor coming up.” He grunted again.

  “If your kid was dying by inches under your eyes, if your wife was starving, and you were broke and had no job, and you read in a paper that you could get a thousand bucks just by telling them you killed someone, what would you do?”

  “A man can’t answer that truthfully until he’s been in that same fix,” Butler told him gravely. “And I haven’t, so I can’t say. Are you trying to tell me that’s why you’re in here?”

  “Trying is right.”

  The dick fanned his hand scornfully between their faces. “The attempt is unsuccessful.”

  “I figured it would be,” Swanson said desolately, biting the tips of both thumbs at once. “But that isn’t why I asked to see you. I’ve got to have a chance to talk to Mrs. Ranger again.”

  “What do you want from her?”

  “Mister, I know what I know. I don’t ask you or anyone else to believe me. Mrs. Ranger is mistaken about my coming up to her outside her house when she was leaving for the theater that night. She may have been excited, high-sterical; just because she saw me handcuffed in front of her, she thought it was me. In fairness to me, won’t you let her give it another try? She may be ashamed, in front of all of you, to admit she was wrong the first time. Won’t you let me see her alone, without any of you guys around? Won’t you give me that one chance? It’s my only one. That’s all I’m asking; I won’t ask another thing.”

  Butler got up and went toward the cell door to be let out, left Swanson hanging on his delayed answer. He didn’t give it to him until after he was already outside in the corridor. “See what I can do for you.” Which meant yes.

  Mrs. Ranger came into the room with one of the other dicks, not Butler. At sight of Swanson, she turned to her escort displeased. “I didn’t know I’d have to face this—this criminal again. It’s very painful for me. I was under the impression I was simply wanted down here to—” Then as she saw the guard with Swanson about to withdraw: “You’re not going to leave me alone in here with him, are you? Why, this man’s dangerous; he’s liable to—”

  “There’ll be somebody within call, Mrs. Ranger, just a few steps down the hall. He’s asked to be permitted to speak to you alone. It may be to your interest to hear what he has to say.”

  “I still don’t like the idea at all,” she complained querulously. The dick and Swanson’s guard strolled out of the room without seeming to hear her, softly closed the door after them.

  She sat down as far across the room from him as she could get. “Well, what is it you want of me, murderer?” she said brittlely, lighting a cigarette. “Make it snappy.”

  “Mrs. Ranger.” Swanson faltered. “Please take another look at me. Look closely. Look good. Look at my height when I’m standing straight like this. Look at the shape of my face. Look at the distance between my eyes. I know there are plenty of people that look like somebody else, but can’t you see I’m not that man that came up to your car outside your house that night? You know I’m not.”

  “Do I?” she said mockingly.

  “This is just between us—”

  “Is it?”

  “We’re alone now by ourselves, there isn’t anyone in here with us.”

  She pronounced each word with the slow clarity of a death sentence. “You are the man I saw!”

  “But I know I couldn’t be, because I wasn’t there where you say you saw me that night. Don’t you see you must be mistaken?” In his despair he groped for any argument that might possibly convince her, blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “There’s a doctor somewhere in this town will tell you—” He stopped suddenly, checked himself.

  “Will tell me what?” She held her cigarette poised half-way to her lips.

  He finished it, as long as he’d gone that far. “Will tell you I couldn’t have been there at the time, because he was up at my flat, my wife’s and my flat, that Wednesday night working over our kid, from nine until nearly midnight, and I was up there with him the whole time. He’ll tell you more, he put the idea into my head—”

  She was staring at him with fixed intensity, but that wasn’t unnatural. “He put the idea into your head of going out and killing my husband?”

  “No, no. He first put the idea into my head of getting the money in any way I could, by hook or crook. But he’ll remember that he was up there, he must keep a record of his calls.”

  “A likely story!” she sneered, but her eyes, hard, glittering, calculating, kept roving the room, along its baseboards and its ceiling joints.

  “It’s true, I tell you!” Swanson burst out helplessly. “Meredith is his name, Dr. Bradley Meredith. Please! You call him up for me. You ask him! He’ll tell you I wasn’t out that night. Then you can tell the cops you were mistaken. Please call him!”

  Again she stared at him inscrutably. “Dr. Bradley Meredith,” she repeated mechanically. Then she let the cigarette fall out of her hand, put the tip of her shoe over it, stood up. She adjusted the silver fox piece over her shoulder. “I will do no such thing! I still say I saw you, and”—very low, almost inaudibly as she moved toward the door—“it’s my word against yours.”

  Then suddenly anger seemed to strike at her, as though held in leash until now. As though she had not thought it worthwhile to waste it on just one onlooker, desired a larger audience. She flung the door open and stormed indignantly out. Her raised voice filled the corridor with angry remonstrance.

  “I won’t be subjected to such an experience again! It’s outrageous and inconsiderate! I wouldn’t have agreed to come down here in the first place if I’d known that was what was wanted of me! It’s an imposition!”

  Butler clicked off the dictaphone in the adjoining room, straightened up, with a lopsided mouth. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” he murmured pensively. “She only got sore after she was outside in the hall where she could be heard.”

  He picked up a phone on the desk, said to the Headquarters operator: “Get me the office address of a Dr. Meredith, Bradley Meredith.” It rang back shortly and he jotted something down, said, “Thanks.” He started to pick it up a second time, then thought better of it, put on his hat instead and went out of the room.

  He had to travel a considerable distance uptown to reach his destination. The doctor’s office turned out to be his home too. He wasn’t, judging by the appearance of the McKinley-era apartment building it was located in, prospering. That, reflected Butler, pushing the bell of the ground-floor rear flat, was nothing against a man these days.

  A young housewife opened the door after a wait of several minutes; Meredith couldn’t even afford an office assistant, evidently.

  “Dr. Bradley Meredith?”

  “You just missed him!” she said regretfully. “He was called away, stepped out only a minute or two before you got here. It was an emergency call, but I don’t believe he’ll be gone long. Would you care to come in and wait?” She motioned him into a forlorn little waiting-room, snapped on a bleak light that didn’t dress it up much. “Did you have an appointment?” she asked. “The doctor’s without an assistant right now and—er, sometimes things get a little mixed up.”

  “I’m not a patient,” he said, to ease her embarrassment. He didn’t tell her he was
from Headquarters either, in order not to frighten her unnecessarily. “But as long as I’m here, I wonder if you could tell me whether he had a patient by the name of Jerome Swanson? I want to make sure I’ve come to the right man.”

  “I’ll look among the unpaid bills; that’s the quickest way of finding out. Most of them are un—” She didn’t finish it, but she didn’t have to.

  There must have been an awful lot of unpaid bills to wade through; it took her a good five or ten minutes to riffle through them. Finally she came out again, said, “Yes, there’s a Jerome Swanson down among his patients. I can’t find any record of his calls, though.” She sniffed the air suspiciously. “Oh, the doctor’s supper!” she wailed. “Excuse me!” and ran down a long inner hall to the back.

  Butler shook his head pityingly. This Meredith couldn’t be anything but a square-shooter, to let his patients get away with their bills the way he seemed to. He killed time thumbing through a number of 1935 magazines strewn about the waiting-room. Fifteen minutes went by. Half an hour. Not once did the phone ring, nor the doorbell.

  The little housewife ventured back again finally, anxiously twisting her apron. “Didn’t he come back yet? I can’t understand it. He told me he’d be back in five or ten minutes at the most. These are supposed to be his office hours, and I know he wouldn’t stay out at this time of the day if he could possibly avoid it.”

  Butler was beginning to have an uneasy feeling himself, that he couldn’t understand and at the same time couldn’t quite shake off. “Was the call from one of his usual patients?” he asked her.

  “I don’t believe so, or he would have mentioned the name to me. He simply said it was some woman whose child had swallowed something; it simply needed to be stood on its head and spanked. He took the call himself; I was in the back.”