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

  They carefully closed the front door behind them, even tried it a second time to make sure it was securely fastened. A snatch of guarded conversation drifted toward him as they made their way down the short front walk to the sidewalk. The uniformed man took no part in it, only the two who had been inside.

  “He’s hot, all right,” Bliss heard one say.

  “Sure, he’s hot, and he already knows it. You notice he wasn’t on that bus when it got in. I’ll beat it down and get the Teletype busy. You put a case on this place. Still, he might try to sneak back in again later.”

  Bliss had been crouched there on his heels. He went forward and down now on the flats of his hands, as stunned as though he’d gotten a rabbit punch at the back of the neck.

  Motionless there, almost dazed, he kept shaking his head slightly, as though to clear it. They were after him; they thought he’d— Not only that, but they’d been tipped off what bus he was supposed to show up on. That could mean only one person, Joe Alden.

  He wasn’t surprised. He could even understand his doing a thing like that; it must seem suspicious to them up there the way she’d disappeared, and Bliss’s own complete lack of any plausible explanation for it. He’d probably have felt the same way about it himself, if he’d been in their place. But he did resent the sneaky way Alden had gone about it, waiting until he was gone and then denouncing him the minute his back was turned. Why hadn’t he tried to have him held by the locals while he was right up there with them? He supposed, now, that was the esoteric meaning in her invitation to him to stay over; so Alden could go out and bring in the cops while he was asleep under their roof. It hadn’t worked because he’d insisted on leaving.

  Meanwhile, he continued watching these men before him who had now, through no fault of his own, become his deadly enemies. They separated. One of them, with the uniformed cop trailing along with him, started down the street away from the house. The other drifted diagonally across to the opposite side. The gloom of an overshadowing tree over there swallowed him, and he failed to show up again on the other side of it, where there was a little more light.

  There was hardly any noise about the whole thing, hardly so much as a footfall. They were like shadows moving in a dream world. A car engine began droning stealthily, slurred away, from a short distance farther down the street, marking the point of departure of two out of the three. A drop of sweat, as cold as mercury, toiled sluggishly down the nape of Bliss’s neck, blotted itself into his collar.

  He stayed there where he was, on all fours behind the hedge, a few minutes longer. The only thing to do was go out and try to clear himself. The only thing not to do was turn around and slink off—though the way lay open behind him. But at the same time he had a chill premonition that it wasn’t going to be so easy to clear himself; that once they got their hands on him—

  “But I’ve got to,” he kept telling himself over and over. “They’ve got to help me, not go after me. They can’t say I—did anything like that to Smiles! Maybe I can hit one of them that’s fair minded, will listen to me.”

  Meanwhile he had remained in the crouched position of a track runner waiting for the signal to start. He picked himself up slowly and straightened to his full height behind the hedge. That took courage, alone, without moving a step farther. “Well, here goes,” he muttered, tightened his belt, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. It was a crawly sort of feeling. He knew, nine chances to one, his freedom of movement was over the minute he stepped out from behind this hedge and went over toward that inky tree shadow across the street that was just a little too lumpy in the middle. He didn’t give a rap about freedom of movement in itself, but his whole purpose, his one aim from now on, was to look for and find Smiles. He was afraid losing it would hamper him in that. She was his wife; he wanted to look for her himself. He didn’t want other guys to do it for him whether they were professionals or not.

  He lighted the cigarette when halfway across the street, but the tree shadow didn’t move. The detective evidently didn’t know him by sight yet, was on the lookout for someone coming from the other direction on his way to the house.

  Bliss stopped right in front of him and said, “Are you looking for me? I’m Ed Bliss and I live over there.”

  The shadow up and down the tree trunk detached itself, became a man. “How’d you know anyone was looking for you?” It was a challenge, as though that were already an admission of guilt in itself.

  Bliss said, “Come inside, will you? I want to talk to you.”

  They crossed over once more. Bliss unlocked the door for him, with his own key this time, and put on the lights. They went into the living-room. It was already getting dusty from not being cleaned in several days.

  He looked Bliss over good. Bliss looked him over just as good. He wanted a man in this, not a detective.

  The detective spoke first, repeated what he’d asked him outside on the street. “How’d you know we’d be looking for you when that bus got in?”

  “I didn’t. I just happened to take a lift down instead.”

  “What’s become of your wife, Bliss?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We think you do.”

  “I wish you were right. But not in the way you mean.”

  “Never mind what you wish. You know another good word for that? Remorse.”

  The blood in Bliss’s face thinned a little. “Before you put me in the soup, just let me talk here quietly with you a few minutes. That’s all I ask.”

  “When she walked out of here Tuesday night, what was she wearing?”

  Bliss hesitated a minute. Not because he didn’t know—he’d already described her outfit to them when he reported her missing—but because he could sense a deeper import lurking behind the question.

  The detective took the hesitancy for an attempt at evasion, went on: “Now, every man knows his wife’s clothes by heart. You paid for every last one of them; you know just what she owned. Just tell me what she had on.”

  There was danger in it somewhere. “She had on a gray suit—jacket and skirt, you know. Then a pink silk shirtwaist. She threw her fur piece back at me, so that’s about all she went out in. A hat, of course. One of those crazy hats.”

  “Baggage?”

  “A black valise with tan binding. Oh, about the size of a typewriter case.”

  “Sure of that?”

  “Sure of that.”

  The detective gave a kind of soundless whistle through his teeth.

  “Whe-ew!” he said, and he looked at Bliss almost as if he felt sorry for him. “You’ve sure made it tough for yourself this time! I didn’t have to ask you that, because we know just as well as you what she had on.”

  “How?”

  “Because we found every last one of those articles you just mentioned in the furnace downstairs in this very house, less than twenty minutes ago. My partner’s gone down to headquarters with them. And a guy don’t do that to his wife’s clothes unless he’s done something to his wife, too. What’ve you done with her, Bliss?”

  The other man wasn’t even in the room with him any more, so far as Bliss was concerned. A curtain of foggy horror had dropped down all around him. “My God!” he whispered hoarsely. “Something’s happened to her, somebody’s done something to her!” And he jumped up and ran out of the room so unexpectedly, so swiftly, that if his purpose had been to escape, he almost could have eluded the other man. Instead, he made for the cellar door and ran down the basement steps. The detective had shot to his feet after him, was at his heels by the time he got down to the bottom. Bliss turned on the light and looked at the furnace grate, yawning emptily open—as though that could tell him anything more.

  He turned despairingly to the detective. “Was there any blood on them?”

  “Should there have been?”

  “Don’t! Have a heart,” Bliss begged in a choked voice, and shaded his eyes. “Who put them in there? Why’d they bring them back here? How’d they get in while I was out?”
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  “Quit that,” the headquarters man said dryly. “Suppose we get started. Our guys’ll be looking all over for you, and it’ll save them a lot of trouble.”

  Every few steps on the way back up those basement stairs, Bliss would stop, as though he’d run down and needed winding up again. The detective would prod him forward, not roughly, just as a sort of reminder to keep going.

  “Why’d they put them there?” he asked. “Things that go in there are meant for fuel. That’s what you came back for, to finish burning them, isn’t it? Too late in the year to make a fire in the daytime without attracting attention.”

  “Listen. We were only married six weeks.”

  “What’s that supposed to prove? Do you think there haven’t been guys that got rid of their wives six days after they were married, or even six hours?”

  “But those are fiends—monsters. I couldn’t be one of them!”

  And the pitiless answer was: “How do we know that? We can’t tell, from the outside, what you’re like on the inside. We’re not X-ray machines.”

  They were up on the main floor again by now.

  “Was she insured?” the detective questioned.

  “Yes.”

  “You tell everything, don’t you?”

  “Because there’s nothing to hide. I didn’t just insure her, I insured us both. I took out twin policies, one on each of us. We were each other’s beneficiaries. She wanted it that way.”

  “But you’re here and she’s not,” the detective pointed out remorselessly.

  They passed the dining-room entrance. Maybe it was the dishes still left on the table from that night that got to him. She came before him again, with her smiling crinkly eyes. He could see her carrying in a plate covered with a napkin. “Sit down there, mister, and don’t look. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  That finished him. That was a blow below the belt. He said, “You gotta let me alone a minute.” And he slumped against the wall with his arm up over his face.

  When he finally got over it, and it took some getting over, a sort of change had come over the detective. He said tonelessly, “Sit down a minute. Get your breath back and pull yourself together.” He didn’t sound like he meant that particularly, it was just an excuse.

  He lighted a cigarette and then he threw the pack over at Bliss. Bliss let it slide off his thigh without bothering with it.

  The detective said, “I’ve been a dick going on eight years now, and I never saw a guy who could fake a spell like you just had, and make it so convincing.” He paused, then went on: “The reason I’m saying this is, once you go in you stay in, after what we found here in the house tonight. And, then, you did come up to me outside of your own accord, but of course that could have been just self-preservation. So I’m listening, for just as long as it takes me to finish this cigarette. By the time I’m through, if you haven’t been able to tell me anything that changes the looks of things around, away we go.” And he took a puff and waited.

  “There’s nothing I can tell you that I haven’t already told you. She walked out of here Tuesday night at supper time. Said she was going to her mother’s. She never got there. I haven’t seen her since. Now you fellows find the things I saw her leave in, stuffed into the furnace in the basement.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and kept it pinched.

  The detective took another slow pull at his cigarette. “You’ve been around to the morgue and the hospitals. So she hadn’t had any accident. Her things are back here again. So it isn’t just a straight disappearance, or amnesia, or anything like that. That means that whatever was done to her or with her, was done against her will. Since we’ve eliminated accident, suicide, voluntary and involuntary disappearance, that spells murder.”

  “Don’t!” Bliss said.

  “It’s got to be done.” The detective took another puff. “Let’s get down to motive. Now, you already have one, and a damned fine one. You’ll have to dig up one on the part of somebody else that’ll be stronger than yours, if you expect to cancel it out.”

  “Who could want to hurt her? She was so lovely, she was so beautiful—”

  “Sometimes it’s dangerous for a girl to be too lovely, too beautiful. It drives a man out of his mind; the man that can’t have her. Were there any?”

  “You’re talking about Smiles now,” Bliss growled dangerously, tightening his fist.

  “I’m talking about a case. A case of suspected murder. And to us cases aren’t beautiful, aren’t ugly, they’re just punishable.” He puffed again. “Did she turn anyone down to marry you?”

  Bliss shook his head. “She once told me I was the first fellow she ever went with.”

  The detective took another puff at his cigarette. He looked at it, shifted his fingers back a little, then looked at Bliss. “I seldom smoke that far down,” he warned him. “I’m giving you a break. There’s one more drag left in it. Anyone else stand to gain anything, financially, by her death, outside of yourself?”

  “No one I know of.”

  The detective took the last puff, dropped the buff, ground it out. “Well, let’s go,” he said. He fumbled under his coat, took out a pair of handcuffs. “Incidentally, what was her real name? I have to know when I bring you in.”

  “Teresa.”

  “Smiles was just your pet name for her, eh?” The detective seemed to be just talking aimlessly, to try to take the sting out of the pinch, keep Bliss’s mind off the handcuffs.

  “Yeah,” Bliss said, holding out his wrist without being told to. “I was the first one called her that. She never liked to be called Teresa. Her mother was the one always stuck to that.”

  He jerked his wrist back in again.

  “C’mon, don’t get hard to handle,” the detective growled, reaching out after it.

  “Wait a minute,” Bliss said excitedly, and stuck his hand behind his back. “Some things have been bothering me. You brought one of them back just then. I nearly had it. Let me look, before I lose it again. Let me look at that letter a minute that her mother sent her yesterday. It’s here in my pocket.”

  He stripped it out of the envelope. Smiles, dear, it began.

  He opened his mouth and looked at the other man. “That’s funny. Her mother never called her anything but Teresa. I know I’m right about that. How could she? It was my nickname. And I’d never seen her until last night and—and Smiles hadn’t been home since we were married.”

  The detective, meanwhile, kept trying to snag his other hand—he was holding the letter in his left—and bring it around in front of him.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bliss pleaded. “I’ve got one of those things now. There was like a hitch in the flow of conversation, an air pocket. She said, ‘I’m Smiles’ mother,’ and he said, ‘You’re Teresa’s mother,’ like he was reminding her what she always called Smiles. Why should he have to remind her of what she always called Smiles herself?”

  “And that’s supposed to clear you of suspicion, because her mother picks up your nickname for your wife, after she’s been talking to you on the phone two or three days in a row? Anyone would be liable to do that. She did it to sort of accommodate you. Didn’t you ever hear of people doing that before? That’s how nicknames spread.”

  “But she caught it ahead of time, before she heard me call it to her. This letter heading shows that. She didn’t know Smiles had disappeared yet, when she sent this letter. Therefore she hadn’t spoken to me yet.”

  “Well, then, she got it from the husband, or from your wife’s own letters home.”

  “But she never used it before; she disliked it until now. She wrote Smiles and told her openly it sounded too much like the nickname of a chorus girl. I can prove it to you. I can show you. Wait a minute, whatever your name is. Won’t you let me see if I can find some other letter from her, just to convince myself?”

  My name is Stillman, and it’s too small a matter to make any difference one way or the other. Now, come on Bliss; I’ve tried to be fair with you until now�
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  “Nothing is too small a matter to be important. You’re a detective; do I have to tell you that? It’s the little things in life that count, never the big ones. The little ones go to make up the big ones. Why should she suddenly call her by a nickname she never used before and disapproved of? Wait, let me show you. There must be one of her old letters upstairs yet, left around in one of the bureau drawers. Just let me go up and hunt for it. It’ll take just a minute.”

  Stillman went up with him, but Bliss could tell he was slowly souring on him. He hadn’t changed over completely yet, but he was well under way. “I’ve taken all the stalling I’m going to from you,” he muttered tight-lipped. “If I’ve got to crack down on you to get you out of here with me, I’ll show you that I can do that, too.”

  Bliss was pawing through his wife’s drawers meanwhile, head tensely lowered, knowing he had to beat his captor’s change of mood to the punch, that in another thirty seconds at the most the slow-to-anger detective was going to yank him flat on the floor by the slack of the collar and drag him bodily out of the room after him.

  He found one at last, almost when he’d given up hope. The same medium-blue ink, the same note paper. They hadn’t corresponded with any great frequency, but they had corresponded regularly, about once every month or so.

  “Here,” he said relievedly, “here, see?” And he spread it out flat on the dresser top. Then he spread the one from his pocket alongside it, to compare. “See? ‘Dearest Teresa.’ What did I tell—”

  He never finished it. They both saw it at once. It would have been hard to miss, the way he’d put both missives edge to edge. Bliss looked at the detective, then back at the dresser again.

  Stillman was the first to put it into words. An expression of sudden concentration had come over his face. He elbowed Bliss a little aside, to get a better look. “See if you can dig up some more samples of her writing,” he said slowly. “I’m not an expert, but, unless I miss my guess, these two letters weren’t written by the same person.”