In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Where?”

  He shrugged.

  She put them in a manuscript box on a shelf near the door.

  Mark gave her a sad little smile. “Whatever else is wrong with me, Kitty, I am not suicidal.”

  A few days later, on Christmas Eve, Wilczynski called the office to see if Mark was back. An office party was in progress, so that the person answering Mark’s phone didn’t bother to inquire whether or not he wanted to take the call. “It’s for you, Mr. C.,” she called out, and Mark soon found himself explaining how, at the last moment, he’d not been able to get away after all.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any word yet on my poems?”

  “It’s too soon, and Kitty would have told me,” Mark said. “Do you need money?”

  “That’s not why I called. I wanted to wish everybody a Merry Christmas.”

  “Thank you, André. But do you need money? You don’t have to keep a stiff upper lip with me.”

  “Just read my pages again and see if we can go to work.”

  “I promise to do it over the holiday.”

  “Mark, are you sure Kitty was serious about getting my poems to a publisher?”

  “Absolutely,” Mark said, but even as he said it, he felt his heart drop down.

  “I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I’d like to have put them together myself. The order makes a difference, don’t you see? And not all of them should go in. Would you ask her? I’ve retyped and arranged them, and I’d be glad to bring them in on Monday.”

  “Call me first thing Monday morning.” Mark had a terrible feeling, hanging up the phone, that Wilczynski was wiser in the ways of Kitty in this instance than he was. She had moved with impossible haste.

  He kept waiting for the right moment to approach the subject. Kitty did it for him. They were home in pajamas and waiting for the delivery of barbecued spareribs, chips, and onion rings, when she said, “Did you tell André I was showing his things to Linden House?”

  “I didn’t mention Linden House.”

  “But you did tell him something?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “Well, now you can have the pleasure of telling him I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You can’t do that to him, Kitty. I can’t do it. Didn’t you tell me you’d already sent them to Linden House? You did tell me that.”

  “I told you that. I didn’t tell him. I wanted to see if it was really good news to you. And it was. Oh, yes, it really was.”

  Mark was too upset to say anything.

  “Don’t you see, this snot-nosed kid, this two-penny poet of yours is fucking up our lives?”

  “They were pretty well fucked up before he came along. Oh, Christ.” He poured himself a double shot of gin and drank it straight.

  “You do hate me, don’t you?” Kitty said.

  “Sometimes it isn’t hard.”

  “You can’t live with me and you can’t live without me, right?”

  He sat down, his face in his hands, and tried to think how to deal with Wilczynski. All his poems retyped, all his hopes recharged.

  Kitty twisted her fingers into his hair and pulled his head up. “Get rid of him, Mark. Or I will.”

  He pulled away from her. “No. I’ve promised to work with him on a project and I don’t intend to let him down on that. But I agree; he’s better off out of the Mark Coleman Agency.”

  Wilding read the draft letter, dated January 5, to Kitty over the phone. It was much along the lines of what he had proposed Mark say to Wilczynski in a phone call. “Mark should sign it, you know.”

  “And if he won’t?”

  Wilding thought back to the day he’d advised that Mark apologize and Kitty’s saying, No problem. “I thought you said he agreed to the severance. I’ll talk to him.”

  “What I want is to sever the relationship entirely. This thing they’re working on it’s an excuse. That’s all. I see them out there in Central Park, walking up and down like a pair of lions in their natural habitat. Oblivious to traffic, to weather …”

  “Kitty, get rid of the binoculars.”

  “Don’t be such a smart-ass. There are a lot of hungry lawyers in this town.”

  “God knows, I’d wish them bon appetit,” Wilding said.

  Kitty ignored the remark. “He’s obsessed with this ridiculous person. And it’s not as though he has talent. He calls himself a poet, therefore he’s a poet. I couldn’t submit stuff like that if I’d wanted to. And I did want to. Sort of.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “My secretary read it.”

  Mark had said she hadn’t, and she hadn’t. There were moments Wilding could almost feel sorry for her, but they were rare moments. “I’ll talk to Mark,” he said.

  “If you can’t reach him just say your name’s Wilczynski.”

  Mark and Wilczynski, huddled in their overcoats, sipped their tea in the drafty zoo cafeteria. Little tornadoes of dust and leaves were dancing outside the glass enclosure. André was saying that he thought he could now take the story, which he’d call Till Death Do Us Part, from there without Mark’s help. At least till he got to the locked-room situation. “You’ve taught me an awful lot, Mark.”

  “It may turn out that awful is the precise word for it.” He leaned back and enjoyed the realization that working with André had been a great pleasure—the quick and probing mind, the eagerness to work, to rework.

  “One thing you taught me,” André said, “Henry James wasn’t a mystery writer.”

  Mark laughed and said, “Drink your tea and we’ll walk back to the apartment and run through the lock business on the scene.”

  “Couldn’t we just work it out on paper? I don’t want to meet Kitty.”

  “She’s at the office,” Mark said. “One member of the firm has to support A.T. and T.” He got up. “And if she were home—so what?”

  André mimed cutting his throat.

  They were skirting Tavern on the Green when André said, “Mark, did a publisher really reject my poems? You just said they were rejected. Was that Kitty?”

  “Yes. She was wise enough to see that you aren’t ready yet and to withdraw them. There’s not a publisher in the city with whom your record isn’t entirely clean.”

  “Good old loyal Mark,” Wilczynski said and gave him a hug.

  Kitty had not intended to be home that afternoon, but something at lunch had disagreed with her. Or else she was coming down with a bug. In any case, she wanted an instant cure, having to carry most of the office burden alone these days. Once home, she certainly did not intend to go out on the terrace with binoculars. She had acquired them after Wilding’s wisecrack, a figure of speech on his part. But she did go out. It was cold and raw and windy, and she really did not care at the moment if she got pneumonia, for no sooner did she have the glasses in focus than she picked up the two men coming toward her. It was at the moment Wilczynski threw his arm across Mark’s shoulder.

  When they got out of the elevator, Mark illustrated his usual procedure on arriving home. He rang the buzzer—two longs, two shorts. “If Kitty were home, she’d answer and probably let me in. And vice versa if it were I who was home …”

  “What do you mean, probably? That’s not good enough.”

  “Don’t be so fierce,” Mark said. “We’ll work it out. Let’s say I was in the habit of forgetting my keys sometimes. And say I phoned to tell her I was on my way home and had forgotten them. She’d be sore as hell at me, but when I buzzed my two longs and two shorts, she’d yank the door off the hinges to confront me. How’s that?”

  “Mark, that’s exactly how I had it in my first version, the one I sent you. Transpose the sexes and it goes like this: She throws the door open to you, only it’s not you. It’s a burglar, a killer. He’d stolen your briefcase in the park with all the notes you’d made on this thriller you were going to write …”

  “Who then does the real job for me,” Mark said. “And look …” He illustrated the two-lock system: “This is wha
t’s called a warded lock. You have to turn the key in it to open it and, once in the apartment, you have to turn the key to lock it behind you. The tumbler lock is automatic. Now the fact is I’ve been known to go out in a hurry and simply let the door lock behind me on the tumbler lock. I sometimes forget the one I have to turn around and diddle with. Kitty’s right. I am careless.”

  “Then it’s simple,” André cried. “Let’s say you’ve called her to say you forgot your keys. She tells you that she’s not surprised because you left the top lock off again. You say, mea culpa, hang up and start for home in your own good time. When you get there, you do the buzzer routine, two longs, two shorts. No answer. You hang in there, thinking she may have fallen asleep. You try again. Then, really panicky, you run down the stairs, get the super, and he comes up with his big ring of skeleton keys. Right? You keep urging him to find one that’s going to fit the top lock. He finds it, but—the shocker—he didn’t need it. The lock was off all the time. But Kitty never, never leaves it off. Which means she must have opened the door to someone, thinking it was you, someone who afterward let himself out, with the automatic lock falling into place when he closed the door. The same as when you forgot your keys. You and the super get the door open, and there she is, lying in a pool of blood.”

  “Jesus,” Mark said.

  “Cold blood,” Wilczynski said. “It’s all in the script. All we have to do now is work out a time schedule.”

  “And write the book.”

  “You do know you’re the major suspect till they pick up the guy who stole your briefcase?”

  “I can live with it,” Mark said.

  In his study Mark got out the manuscript and outline—or, as he had called it then, the proposal. While Wilczynski read it aloud with flourishes and flying spittle, Mark poured each of them a drink. They toasted Till Death Do Us Part and set to work on timing the mayhem schedule.

  Kitty came almost to the door of Mark’s study in her stocking feet. She glimpsed both men, André at the desk. Mark leaning over him, his hand on Wilczynski’s shoulder. She saw him give André an affectionate little poke on the chin, with André leaning back and saying, “Hey, that’s where all this started!” Great laughter. She had almost forgotten what Mark’s laughter sounded like. She heard her name mentioned, and that was enough. She fled to the bedroom, undressed, and buried herself in bed. Time passed. Darkness and silence. When she got up and crept through the apartment, she saw that they had gone out again. She checked the door. Typical: Mark had forgotten to turn the lock. She got her own keys and locked it. Then she went into his study, lit the desk lamp, and opened the middle drawer. A creature of habit, Mark had cleared his desk and put the work in progress in the middle drawer. She read every word of it and saw herself instantly as the cross between Mephistopheles and Svengali. She left his study as she had found it, leaving the vestibule light on, and went back to bed.

  Mark was surprised to find her home. She had come in a few minutes ago, she said, and felt so miserable she decided to go right to bed. She reprimanded him for leaving the door half-locked.

  “Isn’t that just like me?” he said. “And do you know where I was? I went looking for a locksmith. And by the way, it’s time we updated our security system.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek and said he was sorry she wasn’t feeling well. He even smelled like Judas, she thought, although she knew that what she smelled was the spice he chewed to cover the whiskey on his breath.

  Kitty was scheduled for a breakfast meeting in Boston that Thursday. She had first intended to take the early shuttle flight but decided on Wednesday to go up that night and stay over at a hotel. She was not working well and she needed all her wits to try to salvage a contract a publisher claimed the author had violated. Going early meant she could not attend a dinner party Wednesday night for the benefit of the Writers’ Colony, an annual gala event at which she and Mark were often photographed as being among its celebrities. There was a time when missing it would have grieved her. Now she felt only a twinge of anger at not being grieved. Mark said he would put in an appearance at the dinner, and she immediately wondered if that meant he would go off somewhere with Wilczynski as soon as he could get away.

  She stopped home to pick up her overnight case after speaking at the Columbia University seminar on “The Business of Writing.” The word business Mark had wanted out. He also seemed to have opted out of the office that afternoon as well. He was at his desk, the study door open, the wire basket at the side of his chair half full of typescript, where, for the sake of speed, he dropped each page as he read it.

  “Is that you, Kitty?” he called out as she was locking the door behind her.

  “Who else?”

  She stopped for a moment at his desk, and they exchanged a few words about the seminar, Mark rhythmically, automatically, and blindly continuing to leaf the pages of manuscript into the basket.

  “That must be a great book,” Kitty said.

  Realizing what he was doing, he laughed and fished the unread pages out of the basket. “Monumental,” he said.

  In the bedroom she noted that he had already put out his dinner jacket, dress shirt, and black tie, and for an instant she was tempted to reverse her plans again. A seesaw: Her life had become a seesaw, she on one end, Wilczynski on the other, Mark the hump in the middle. She put a fresh blouse in the case for the morning and closed it. If she hurried, she could get in a couple of hours at the office before leaving for La Guardia. She was touching up her makeup when the phone rang. Mark took the call on the third ring. He was still talking when she set down her purse and overnight bag outside his door.

  All she heard at first was a couple of grunts, cheerful, humorous sounds. She had no doubt at all as to who was on the phone. Then Mark said, “As long as you’ve got a tux, wear it. But no sneakers, hear me, boy?” He saw Kitty then and finished off “Seven-thirty, just inside the Fifth Avenue door. Okay?”

  “I’m not going,” Kitty said when he’d hung up the phone.

  “You’re not going to Boston, is that it?” He glanced at her and quickly away.

  “That’s it. So you’d better call him back and tell him you’re taking your wife to the dinner, not your mistress.”

  Mark sat for a second or two, grappling with the concept. Then: “Jesus Christ!” He got up and went to the teacart, where he poured himself a drink. He did not want to look at her, not the way she was now, her face distorted and blotched with anger. “I could get down on my knees and swear,” he said. “But it wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t believe, could you, that I had in mind how important it might be for him to meet the Colony trustees? He ought to try for a fellowship.”

  Kitty hardly knew what she was doing. A raging instinct sent her to the manuscript box in which she had put away the knives on the morning he had not been able to go to the Cape. The hunting knife in hand, she meant to force her will upon him, nothing else. “Are you going to call him?”

  Mark took his drink back to the desk, still averting his eyes from her. “I’m going to think about it,” he said and drank the whiskey down.

  She even challenged him: “Look at me, Mark.”

  He shook his head.

  When she came up behind him, he might have thought she would yank his head up by the hair again. Instead she plunged the knife into his back and left it there. He slumped forward onto the desk, and then when the swivel chair rolled out from under him, he fell to the floor. By then Kitty was at the door. She caught up her purse and overnight case only to set them down again twice, once to open the vestibule door and once to lock it behind her. There was no way she could stand and wait for the elevator. She ran down the stairs, floor after bare-walled floor, her knees buckling and then steadying sufficiently to carry her on. She stood at what she thought was the door entering onto the lobby and tried to pretend that it was all a nightmare, and that beyond the door she would wake up. She opened the door and found herself not in the lobby but in the basement, a few feet away from th
e laundry room, where she could hear the chatter of women and the raucous laughter of a neighbor whose voice she recognized. She went out the service entrance and then walked as fast as she could toward Columbus Avenue, a very long block from Central Park. The cold wind of February tore at the coat of her three-piece suit and then reached in to catch at her throat.

  A crime of passion, a crime of passion: The words kept racing through her mind. I didn’t want to kill him, she tried to tell herself, but she did and she knew it. The very thought of him and Wilczynski going to the dinner set her aflame again. She began to feel justified and instantly then to wonder if it were possible to escape discovery. The doorman might not even have seen her come home. She had bussed down from Columbia and entered the building while he was putting someone in a cab. And no one had seen her leave just now. Only Mark knew that she’d come home. She looked at her watch. Well under an hour ago. If only she had not double-locked the door, she might get away free. She realized it was their very script that she was going over in her mind! The top lock was to be left off as though a burglar/murderer had been admitted by mistake and after the crime had simply walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind him. She had even followed the instructions about going down the stairs and, inadvertently, out through the basement. She turned back, determined to go in as she had come out of the building. If she were seen, she would brazen it out somehow. Her writers called her the great improviser. She expected Mark to be discovered by their cleaning woman in the morning, who would arrive at ten o’clock and let herself in, noting as she did so that the top lock was off again. A born tattler, she never failed to let Kitty know when Mr. Coleman had forgotten to double-lock the door.

  Wilczynski, of course, might try to sound an alarm when Mark failed to show up at the Colony dinner. By then she would be in Boston, with only Mark and her secretary knowing where. The police would do nothing before morning.

  She was unable to return to the building through the basement, because the entrance was locked from the inside. She stowed her overnight bag in one of the empty ash cans, where she could pick it up later and thus not be encumbered with it now. She went around the building to the corner of Central Park West, from where she watched with agonizing patience the doorman popping in and out. Then God—or the devil—was with her, for a school bus came and dispersed several children into his charge. Kitty went into the building by the side entrance as the youngsters were going around and around in the revolving center door. Mothers and nannies tried to snatch and sort them out. She reached the elevator ahead of all of them, pressed the number for the second floor below her own, and went slowly upward entirely alone. Entering her own vestibule from the stairwell instead of the elevator, she found it a foreign place. The naked aluminum coat rack—unused since the November party—made it seem a desolation. It would never be home again. The sorrow of it welled up in her, the tears making it difficult for her to see to put the key in the lock. She intended to go, having turned that one key, but the overwhelming feeling hit her again. She felt that once she opened the door, she would step out of the nightmare, home safe. But when she did open it, she knew the nightmare was forever: Mark, lying on the floor, had gathered himself to himself and died in the fetal position.