She Woke to Darkness

by Brett Halliday

  “He did.” The bald-headed bartender’s face was pale and he stood stiffly erect with a long forefinger pointed accusingly at David Jenson. “The next day after it happened, he came in and beat around the bush some and ended up by offering me a thousand dollars if I’d promise I wouldn’t tell the police that Miss Murray had made a call from our place the night before.”

  “You knew it was in connection with a murder,” said Lieutenant Hogan sternly.

  “I realized that, yes sir.”

  “And you must know that withholding evidence is a crime in New York.”

  “I suppose it is, yes, sir.”

  “Then why did you agree to do it?” roared the Lieutenant. “You’ll be lucky, by God, if we don’t pull your license for this.”

  “I don’t think so, sir.” The bartender was respectful but unfrightened.

  “Why not?” thundered Hogan. “You admit you took a bribe to suppress relevant evidence in a murder investigation.”

  “I admitted nothing of the kind, sir.” Jack retained his calm. “I admitted I took a thousand dollars from this gentleman…” Again he pointed directly at David Jenson. “…at his insistence, sir. To not tell the police if I was asked that Miss Murray had made a phone call from our place the preceding midnight.”

  “What sort of quibbling is that? Suppression of evidence…!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Jack smugly. “I saw nothing wrong in what I did. Suppose, sir,” he went on before the Lieutenant could explode again, “right here and now I was to offer you a thousand dollars if you’d promise me faithfully you wouldn’t tell my wife you’d caught me in bed with another woman this afternoon. Would it be a crime for you to accept the money?”

  “Not necessarily. Because I haven’t caught you doing that.”

  “Exactly, sir. And Miss Murray didn’t make any such telephone call as this gentleman paid me not to tell the police about.” Jack paused and shrugged elaborately. “He offered me the money, you see, to simply tell the truth. Why shouldn’t I have taken it? Was that a crime?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Shayne harshly. “Are you trying to tell us Miss Murray didn’t come in at midnight and borrow a dime from you to make her call to the man who was subsequently murdered?”

  “I don’t know how I could say it any plainer, sir,” sighed Jack. “I not only say that’s the truth, but I’ll swear to it on a stack of Bibles ten feet high.”

  “Then why,” demanded Shayne, “did you tell Mr. Recker here,” he turned to point to Lew Recker, “just before you closed up that morning, that Miss Murray had made such a call?”

  “I didn’t do no such thing,” said Jack earnestly. “I never saw this one before, so help me God.” He paused to draw in a deep breath and then addressed himself plaintively to Lieutenant Hogan: “God knows, Commissioner, I’m sorry if what I did was wrong. But it seemed all right to me. I was just getting paid to tell the truth, and I couldn’t see anything wrong in that.”

  “Hold everything,” said Ed Radin authoritatively, moving forward past Lieutenant Hogan to confront the others. “We happen to know you’re lying,” he told the bartender. “We have Elsie Murray’s word for it that she did make such a call.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” he went on swiftly to Shayne. “I decided it was best to turn our copy of Elsie’s script over to the Lieutenant. He’s read it and knows as much as we do about it.”

  “Your copy?” The words were torn from deep in Lew Recker’s throat. “There were only two copies.”

  “And you think you destroyed both of them, don’t you?” Michael Shayne moved in fast and grabbed the writer as he whirled to make an attempt to rush for the windows overlooking Madison Avenue.

  “You slipped up, bud!” He whirled Recker back roughly, sending him flat on the floor in front of the others. “Elsie’s manuscript had you worried, and rightly. If the investigation into Green’s death was ever reopened, you knew it was inevitable that some smart dick would eventually get around to questioning Jack here about that non-existent telephone call and would learn the truth. That would finish you. They’d learn there had been no such call. That you had lied about it wholly and completely to poor Elsie Murray who trusted you to go out that night to question Jack.

  “And once they learned you had lied to her about that,” he went on harshly, “the cops would have kept digging until they got the truth. You dropped her in front of her apartment that midnight,” he went on inexorably, “jealous as hell because she wouldn’t let you come up with her. You drove on half a block or so and stopped to see whom she was meeting. What man she preferred to you. And you saw Elbert Green drive up right behind you and pick her up.

  “And you followed them in your car to the Beloit. You managed somehow to discover the number of their room and you went up. You killed Green in a jealous rage, and you added the crowning touch by slipping a folded two-dollar bill into the top of Elsie’s stocking before you hurried away to meet Estelle and establish an alibi for yourself.”

  “No!” screamed Lew Recker, rising on one elbow to glare up at the redhead. “How do you know about the two-dollar bill? How does anybody know…?”

  “He’s all yours, Lieutenant,” Shayne said disgustedly, turning away from the prostrate writer before his worse instincts overcame his better judgement and he swung his foot as he had threatened to do a little earlier. “Don’t be too tough on David Jenson, though he did bribe Jack to tell the truth. He was in a pretty tough spot himself, not knowing where the hell he’d been that evening and whether or not he had murdered Green. Let’s all have a drink of Recker’s whiskey,” he added, “and if any of us pass out we’ll understand exactly how David Jenson felt the next morning when he woke up with Elsie’s extra key in his pocket.”

  Postscript

  That was the end of it. The hospital doctors were right and I did come out of my coma that same afternoon. With no permanent damage to anything except my pride.

  What a hell of a mess I’d made out of my opportunity to watch the unfolding of a murder case from the inside out! Lying gagged and unconscious in a hotel room just down the corridor from my suite while Ed Radin and Mike Shayne solved the case for me!

  Lew Recker had signed a full confession by the time I came to in the hospital. He was the writer Elsie had showed her manuscript to, of course, being convinced in her own mind that he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Green’s death and thinking it quite safe to show it to him. All because of his clever lie to her about the telephone call she hadn’t made to Green.

  It was Recker, of course, who had telephoned Elsie while I was with her that night, and who had been told by her that she planned to let me see the script the next day.

  After strangling Elsie, he looked around her apartment for the manuscript, but found only the carbon copy there. Knowing there couldn’t be a carbon without an original, he correctly deduced that Elsie had lied to him over the phone and that the original must already be in my possession.

  Not knowing how to reach me in New York, Recker went through hell for a couple of hours until he hit upon the device of calling Dorothy Gardiner and using the name of George Coxe to get the name of my hotel and room number.

  After checking in on the same floor under an assumed name, Recker came to my room with the same blackjack that had killed Elbert Green and rang my buzzer.

  I can verify this part of his confession. I had dropped off to sleep fully dressed only a short time before, and was dazed and groggy when I heard the buzzer and stumbled to the door. I opened it and vaguely saw the figure of a man standing there, and felt something hit me a terrific wallop.

  And that was all I did know.

  The only thing that saved my life at that moment (Recker admitted in his confession) was the fact that Elsie’s script lay on the table still in its original envelope underneath my hat. He knew I had come in late after drinking a good deal, and assumed I had simply tossed the envelope down without reading it and dropped into bed.

 
If I hadn’t read it, I was no danger to him. All he had to do was destroy this second copy to be safe.

  But he couldn’t be absolutely positive I hadn’t read it, or enough of it to come up with the truth if I recovered later. So he didn’t want to leave me there in my own room where I’d be discovered quickly, yet he had a certain aversion to committing another cold-blooded murder unless it was necessary.

  He solved the problem by dragging my unconscious body down the short length of corridor to his own room, binding and gagging me and leaving a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door.

  That way, he felt I was safely immobilized for the time being at least while he sat tight to see what happened. Later, he could have returned at his leisure to finish me off if that course seemed indicated.

  But Mike Shayne got to him before he decided that was necessary, so I’m still alive to tell the story.

  Next time I attend a mystery writers’ banquet in New York, I shall take Mike along as a bodyguard. And when I meet an attractive and sensuous female at the bar I’ll turn her over to Mike and run like hell.

  That’s his forte—definitely not mine.

  Miami, Florida.

  July 25, 1953