FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum

by Cornell Woolrich

  I think he would have pulled through; he was beginning to revive as air got into his lungs. The congested blood started leaving his face little by little, his eyes closed instead of staying wide open, but you could hear him breathing again, hoarsely. So I edged him a little closer, threw up the lower sash all the way to the top—and just stepped back from him. I didn’t touch him, just took my support away, retreated farther into the room. He wavered there, upright by the open window. Vertigo had evidently set in as his lungs began to function and his heartbeat came back to normal. It was a toss-up whether he’d go back, forward, or sideways; the only sure thing was he wasn’t staying on his own feet just then, and was going into a faint.

  Maybe there was some kind of a draught pulling at him from the long, deep shaft out there; I don’t know. He went forward—as though a current of air were sucking him through the window. It was a good high window. His head just missed the sash bisecting it. He folded up at the waist across the ledge, half in, half out, like a lazy guy leaning too far out in slow motion—and gravity did the rest. Death beat his glimmering faculties to the punch—he was gone before he could fling up his arms, grab at anything. His legs whipped after him like the tail of a kite—and the window-square was empty.

  The impact seemed to come up long afterwards, from far away, muffled, distant, and even the new me didn’t like the sound of it very well. I didn’t make the mistake of going closer and looking down after him. Almost immediately there was the sound of another window being thrown up somewhere down the line, a pause, and then a woman’s screech came tearing up the shaft.

  I saw that one of his unlaced shoes had come off while I was hauling him across the room. I edged it back under his own bed, smoothed that from a condition of having been struggled upon back to a condition of just having been slept in, particularly the pillows. I erased a blurred line across the carpet-nap that his one dragging shoe had made, with the flat of my own shoe.

  Then I picked up the towel I’d already wet once, went back into the bathroom, turned on the shower full-blast, and got back under it again. Its roar deadened everything, but a sudden draft on my wet shoulder tipped me off when they’d used the passkey on the room-door. “Hey, Sherrill!” I boomed out just as they came in, “can I borrow some of your shaving-cream?” I stuck my head farther out and hollered, “What’s the matter with ya, didya go back to sleep in there? That’s the third time I’ve asked ya the same question—”

  Then I saw them all standing looking in at me. “What’s up?” I yelled, and reached out and shut off the water.

  The sudden silence was stunning.

  The hotel detective said, “Your roommate just fell out of the window in there.”

  “Oh, my God!” I gasped, and had to hang onto the rubber curtain to keep from tipping over, myself, for a minute. Some soap got in my eyes and made them fill with water. Through it I could see them all looking at me, from the bellhop up, as though they knew how bad I felt, and felt sorry for me.

  Three weeks to the day, after that morning in the hotel at Jefferson, Thelma’s message was waiting for me in my mailbox at the Marquette in Middleburg. I had been holed-up there for two weeks past, from the moment I’d felt it prudent to leave Jefferson. Not that I’d been under arrest or even suspicion at any time, but the detectives there had, naturally, questioned me about how well I’d known Sherrill, whether he’d said anything to indicate he intended suicide. I seemed to satisfy them on all points.

  They kept me waiting another twenty-four hours—and on pins and needles. Then they sent word that I was free to leave whenever I wanted to. I didn’t waste time hanging around once I heard that! It struck me that I hadn’t been called on to make a deposition at any coroner’s inquest, but I wasn’t inclined to argue with them on that point. Nor did I bother trying to find out what disposition had been made of Sherrill’s remains. I simply left—while the leaving was good!

  Beautifully as I’d got away with that, though, I had plenty of other things to get jittery about while I was waiting to hear from her the next couple weeks in Middleburg. I kept wondering whether she was going to double-cross me or not, and the suspense got worse day by day and hour by hour. If she did, I had no come-back.

  She’d soaped me up by saying all I had to do if she tried to hold out was show up home and give her away. True enough as far as it went, but there was one thing I’d overlooked at the time: what was to keep her there on tap once she got her paws on the insurance check? All she had to do was blow out in some other direction and—good-bye ten grand!

  That was what really had me down, the knowledge that she had been holding a trump-hand all through this little game of ours—with me trying to bluff her. And from what I knew of her, she didn’t bluff easy. I’d even set a deadline in my own mind: forty-eight hours more, and if I didn’t hear from her, I’d head back home myself, no matter what the risk, and land on her with both feet before she took a powder out on me.

  Nothing had muffed at her end—I knew that for a fact; so she couldn’t alibi that she wasn’t in line for the money. I’d been buying our hometown papers daily ever since I’d been in Middleburg, watching to see if the thing would curdle or start to smell bad, and it hadn’t.

  It would have been in headlines in a minute if it had, but all I had were the few consecutive items bearing on it that I’d clipped out and stuck away in my wallet. I’d been taking them out nightly and going over them, to reassure myself, and it was as good as television. First, the news announcement that had sent Sherrill to his death (although he’d seen it in a Jefferson, not a hometown paper).

  Then an inconspicuous obituary the next day, mentioning a date for the cremation. Then a twenty-four-hour postponement of the cremation, with no reason given (this had given me a bad night, all right!). Then finally, two days later, the bare announcement that the cremation had taken place the day before. That was all, but that was plenty. The thing was signed, sealed, and delivered—we’d got away with it!

  Even outside of all that, anyone in my position, naturally, would have been jittery. Just having to sit tight day by day waiting for the pay-off was reason enough. The one hundred and seventy-five dollars I’d chiseled out of her was starting to run down; I wanted to get my hands on the real dough and get out of this part of the country altogether. Middleburg, after all, wasn’t so very far away from the hometown. Somebody who has known me might drop over from there and spot me when I least expected it; the young mustache I was nursing along was no guarantee at all against recognition.

  I stayed in my room most of the time, let them think what I’d told Sherrill, that I was in precarious health. I began to look the part, too, so it wasn’t hard to sell the idea. I haunted my letter-box downstairs, and just went as far as the corner-stand once a day, to get the hometown paper, the Kay City Star. I always soft-pedaled it by buying a Jefferson one and a Middleburg one along with it, and then discarding them in the nearest trash-can.

  And up in my room I always tore the name and place of publication off the tops of every page of each copy, carefully burning the strips in an ashtray, so the chambermaid or anyone else finding it wouldn’t know just where it was published.

  I had a bad minute or two one evening when the news vendor couldn’t find me a copy of the hometown rag. “They usually send me two,” he apologized, “but they were one short today, and there’s another gent been buying ’em right along, like you do yourself, and he musta got here ahead of you, I guess, and took the only one I had—”

  I got very quiet, then finally I said off-handedly, “He a regular customer of yours? How long’s he been doing that?”

  “Oh, two, three weeks now—’bout as long as you have. He lives right in the same hotel you do, I think; I see him come in and go out of there a lot. Nice guy, minds his own business—”

  I said, even more off-handedly than before, “D’je happen to mention to him that I been taking the Kay City Star from you too?”

  “Nah!” he said emphatically, “I nev
er said ‘Boo’ to him.”

  I had to be satisfied with that, and in a day or two my apprehension had dulled again, not having anything further to feed on. The Marquette was no skyscraper honeycomb; I’d seen all the faces in it by this time, and there was definitely no one there that knew me or that I knew, or that I’d ever seen before. Nor did the register, when I went over it without much trouble, show any Kay City entries.

  The whole thing was just a harmless coincidence, that was all; probably the guy took the Star purely for business reasons. There was a pudgy realtor who had the room across the hall from mine; I’d met him once or twice on the elevator, and it was probably he, keeping tab on real estate opportunities in various townships. That reassured me completely; he fitted the newsman’s description exactly, and never even so much as looked at me the few times we happened on each other.

  One night I eavesdropped while I was unlocking my own door and overheard him having a long argument with somebody over the phone. “That’s an ideal site,” he was saying. “Tell ’em they can’t have it at that price. Why, it would be a gold-mine if we leased it for a filling-station—”

  On the twenty-first morning after Sherrill’s death, I stepped up to the hotel desk—and for the first time there was white showing in my letter-box! My overwrought nerves began crackling like high-tension wires. It had a Kay City postmark. In my excitement I dropped it and this real-estate guy, who had come up to the desk for his own mail just then, picked it up and handed it back to me without a word.

  I went over in a corner of the lobby and tore it open. There was no signature—probably she hadn’t wanted to hand me a blackjack that could be used against her—but it was from her all right. I recognized the writing, although she’d tried to distort it a little, or else her excitement had done that for her.

  Jackie has come through pretty. If you want to see him, you know what to do about it. It’s up to you to do the traveling, not me. I’m not at the old place any more, so it’ll be okay. 10 State Street is where you’ll find me.

  The way I burned it’s a wonder smoke didn’t curl out of my ears. So it was up to me to do the traveling, was it? She knew what a chance I’d be taking by showing up home, even if she had changed addresses!

  I came to a sudden decision. “All right, for being so smart, she’s going to pony over the whole ten grand now! I’m going down there and clean her out! And if she opens her trap, she’s going to suddenly quit being alive!”

  I folded the thing up, put it in my pocket, and went out. I hit the seedy part of Jefferson, across the railroad tracks, and picked up a .32 and some cartridges at a hock-shop without too many questions asked, particularly the one about where was my license. I came back and I booked a seat on the three o’clock bus, which would get me to Kay City just after dark. I bought a cheap pair of reading glasses and a flat tin of shoe polish. I went back to my room, knocked the lenses out of their tortoise-shell rims and heavied up my mustache with a little of the blacking.

  At half-past two in the afternoon I went downstairs and paid my bill and turned in my key. The clerk didn’t say a word, but I saw him stick a bright-red pasteboard strip like a bookmark in my letter-box. “What’s that for?” I asked idly.

  “That’s to show it’s available.”

  “You’ve got one in the one right next to it too.” I squinted.

  “Yeah, 919, across the hall from you, checked out about half an hour ago too.”

  The only thing that kept me from getting flurried was that his check-out had come ahead of mine, and not after; otherwise, I’d have suspected there was something phony about it. But this way, how could he have possibly known I intended leaving myself, when the first warning I’d given was this very minute?

  “Just the same,” I said to myself, “he’s been taking the Kay City Star every day. I’m gonna take a good look in that bus, and if he’s in it, I don’t get on. I’m not taking any chances, not gonna lay myself open the way I did running into Sherrill!”

  I timed myself to get to the depot just five minutes ahead of starting-time. The bus was standing there waiting to go. I walked all down one side of it, gandering in every window, and then doubled back on the other side, doing the same thing, before I got on. There wasn’t a sign of him.

  I found my seat and sat down on the edge of it, ready to hop off if he showed at the last moment. He didn’t.

  I looked them all over after a while, and there wasn’t anything about any of them to call for a second look. Nor did I get even a first one from anybody. It was dark by the time we hit Ferndale, and about nine thirty when we got into Kay City at the downtown terminus. I slipped on the lensless pair of rims just before the doors opened, and didn’t waste any time lingering about the brightly lighted depot. Outside in the street-dusk I’d pass muster, as long as I didn’t stop to stare into any glaring shop windows.

  State Street was a quiet residential thoroughfare lined with prosperous residences; it was nearer in to the heart of the city than where we had lived, though. I reconnoitered number 10 from the opposite side of the street, going past it first and then doubling back. It was just a substantial brick house, two-storied, without anything about it to make me leery. Only one window, on the ground floor, showed a light. I thought, “What the hell is she doing in a place like that?” I decided she must have rented a furnished room with the family that owned it.

  I crossed over farther down, and then once more started back toward it. There wasn’t a soul on the street, at the moment. Instead of going right up to the door, I edged around to the window where the light was and took a look in.

  Thelma was in the room there, and she seemed to be alone. She was right in a line with the window, sitting by herself in a big chair, holding a cigarette and staring intently over into a corner which I couldn’t see from where I was. I could tell she was under a strain—the hand holding the cigarette shook visibly each time she lifted it. I waited a while, then I tapped lightly on the pane.

  She looked square over at me, didn’t show a bit of surprise. She jerked her head in the direction of the front door, but didn’t get up or anything. I went around to it and tried it cautiously. She’d left it on the latch, for me to walk in without ringing. I closed it softly behind me, tapped the .32 in my pocket, and moved a few paces down the hall, listening. The house was dead; the people were out, whoever they were.

  I put my hand on the side-door that led to the room where she was and pushed it open. She was still sitting there, shakily holding that cigarette. “Hello, Cookie,” she said in a funny voice.

  “Hello, yourself,” I growled, and I looked all around the room. It was empty, of course. There was another, leading out somewhere toward the back, its door standing wide open, but I couldn’t see a thing through it.

  “Did you get my note?” she said. Then she said: “You’ve come back to kill me, of course. I’ve had a feeling it would end up that way all along. Is that it, in your pocket there?” And her eyes rolled around spasmodically, not at all matching the quiet dryness of her voice.

  I said, “What’s the matter with you, you paralyzed or something? Whaddya keep sitting there like that for? Gimme the dough, all of it!”

  She said, “What was our arrangement, again?”

  “Twenty-five, seventy-five, with you on the short end. But that’s out, now; I’m taking the whole works—and here’s the convincer—” I took the gun out slowly.

  The cigarette fell, but she still didn’t move.

  “Up!” a voice said in my ear, and I could feel snub-nosed steel boring into my spine through my clothes. Then half of Kay City seemed to come into the room all at one time, through the door behind me and also through that other one opposite. One guy even stood up from behind the big easy chair she’d been in all along, a gun on me across her shoulder.

  I let the .32 drop and showed my palms. I knew the Kay City chief of police by a picture of him I’d once seen. “Well,” he purred, “nice of you to drop in at my house like this! Wrists out
, please!”

  I said to her, “You dirty, double-crossing—”

  “I didn’t cross you, Cookie,” she said wearily. “They tumbled the very next day—”

  “Shut up!” I raged at her.

  “That’s all right, Cook,” the chief of police said soothingly.

  “The guy was never cremated at all—we saw to that. We inserted that phony announcement in the paper ourselves. She’s been in custody ever since—it’s just that we were waiting for the insurance check to come through, to use in evidence. You thought you were good, didn’t you? Want me to tell you what you had for breakfast Tuesday? Or what tune you whistled when you were getting ready for bed a week ago Sunday night? No trouble at all!”

  They had to hold me up between them. “I didn’t kill him,” I gasped, “it was self-defense—”

  The fat realtor from the Marquette came around in front of me. “Maybe it was self-defense when you pushed Sherrill out of the window in Jefferson?”

  “I was taking a shower; I didn’t have anything to do with—”

  “Sherrill didn’t die,” he said. “A couple of clothes-lines at the bottom of that shaft were kinder to him than you were. He’s been in a hospital down there with his back in a plaster-cast for the past three weeks. Crippled for life, maybe, thanks to you—but able to talk. He told us all about it, that’s how it blew up at this end.”

  Something seemed to blow up in me too, the way it had that night. I was Ben Cook again, who’d never done anything wrong in his life. It was as if the streak of badness had worked itself out, somehow.