The Night People

by Edward D. Hoch

  “I know. I just thought maybe….”

  “Well, hold him for examination. In the meantime, have you got any other ideas?”

  “One, Arnold, but I don’t know what you’ll think of it.”

  Fleming sighed. The headache was getting worse. “Let’s hear it, anyway.”

  “Well, suppose that this Mrs. Mitchell was having an affair with another man. Suppose they decided to get rid of her husband without directing suspicion toward themselves.”

  “You mean the first and third murders would be necessary only to hide the real motive for the second murder?”

  “Yes. I read something like that in a book once.”

  Fleming smiled slightly. “I read the same one. Christie, I believe. Well, personally I have strong doubts that Mrs. Mitchell is anyone who would plot to kill her husband in such a brutal way, but if you can find another man in the picture, I might listen to you.”

  “Good. I’ll give it a try, anyhow, Arnold.”

  Fleming watched him walk quickly away, full of that usual youthful drive, the ability to overcome the fantastic odds, that had once been the mark of Arnold Fleming as well. Carter was in many ways much like a son to him. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad giving the department to Carter.

  But then what would he do, when the long nights rolled in across the river….

  And the world was silent except for the clatter of the Teletype and the screeching of the sirens….

  What would he do …?

  The Fey Club was alive with midnight activity when Fleming pushed open the door and stood looking over the line of men and women at the bar. A few familiar faces nodded toward him and then turned to whisper among themselves.

  The Fey Club had been Tony DeLuca’s hangout. Why? Fleming had heard there was a singer here….

  The lights dimmed, even as the thought crossed his mind, and then a sudden flickering pink spotlight picked out the girl leaning against the white piano….

  “… the … night … is mine….”

  The voice, the voice of a thousand nightclubs from Broadway to Frisco, sang out across the crowded room. It was not a good voice, but it had that quality, that thing about it that excited younger men and disturbed even Fleming. This, then, was Rhonda Roberts, the girl in Tony DeLuca’s life.

  And possibly the girl in his death, as well?

  Fleming watched, bewitched, for twenty minutes, as the spotlight wove a fabric of beauty around her face, her body, her silken legs. She never moved from that spot, and when the light would drop away from her entirely, there was a feeling that the voice must have been coming from another world.

  Then, suddenly, it was over, and the house lights grew bright again. Fleming stayed to watch part of the next act, a young Negro playing something very fast on a set of silver drums. Then he walked backstage to the dressing rooms.

  She was just finished changing when he knocked on the open door and stepped inside.

  “Well? What do you want, pop?”

  “Police. I have a few questions,”

  “About Tony?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was a bum.”

  “I understood you two were friendly.”

  She slipped a dressing gown over the brief pink costume she’d changed to, and lit a cigarette. “That was a long time ago, believe me. He was a joker that just wouldn’t give up trying, that’s all.”

  “He have any enemies?”

  “Yeah. Me.”

  “You kill him?”

  “With a hatchet? Are you kidding? What do you think I am, a damn Indian or something? I’d have shot him. Right between the eyes.”

  “You don’t go with your voice, Miss Roberts.”

  “What?”

  “I heard you sing out there. I was expecting something quite different.”

  That shut her up for a minute while she thought over his remark and its meaning. Finally she gave up and said, “Well, he was no good, anyway.”

  “He ever give you any presents?”

  “Tony?” she laughed. “The only thing he ever gave me was this cold I’ve got. He was just a cheap punk, always hanging around, always bothering me. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  Fleming nodded in sympathy. Somehow, Rhonda Roberts reminded him of another girl he’d once known, a girl he’d almost married. At the time he’d been glad he hadn’t, but now sometimes when the nights were long and lonely he wished it had turned out differently.

  He said goodbye to Tony DeLuca’s ex-girlfriend and left the Fey Club’s smoky haze for the foggy dampness of the outside world….

  Three people.

  An old woman, a married man, and a young hoodlum, all with their skulls split open.

  Three pins on a map of the city….

  Had it just happened that way? Had they just been the first persons he’d seen, or did the madman find some link between them?

  “Nothing on Mitchell’s wife. I checked all the neighbors, everything. If she was playing around with another guy, she was keeping it mighty quiet.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Carter. I never thought too much of that idea, anyway.” Fleming lifted himself from his chair and stared out the window at the gloomy mist. “Isn’t this rain ever going to stop, Carter?”

  “I guess not, Arnold.”

  Fleming sighed and looked away. His head was still hurting him….

  “Have you been getting enough sleep, Arnold?”

  “No, damn it! Do you expect me to sleep with this thing going on? How do we know he wasn’t out again last night, with his axe?”

  The Teletype came to life then, and Carter walked over to read it. “Here’s something….”

  Fleming joined him and they read it together. BODY OF MAN FOUND IN ROOM OF STAR HOTEL, APPARENT HOMICIDE.

  “Do you think …?”

  “No,” Fleming said, “not in a hotel room. The others were all outside. And besides, it’s on the wrong side of the river.”

  “We’d better get down there, anyway.”

  “Yeah.”

  They drove across town to the Star Hotel, one of the best in the city. Already there was a crowd in the lobby, and they had to fight their way through to the elevator.

  Upstairs, Fleming took one look at the cops’ faces and knew what they would find inside.

  The man’s name had been Harold Rothman. He was a salesman for an electric switch company. He had been in town only four days. He’d been dead about twelve hours when the chambermaid found him, and there was no doubt that he was the fourth victim of the axe murderer….

  “You were right, Arnold,” Carter told him, sometime later. “I checked the calls he’d made while he was in town. One of them was in the same section as the other murders.”

  Fleming grunted and went back to studying the map. “But of course now, Carter, the problem is somewhat different. Before there was always the possibility that our killer had picked people at random, striking whoever happened to be near. But now he has entered a hotel room, murdered this man, and escaped past dozens of people with an axe probably hidden under his coat. Why did he take such a chance, when the streets and alleys and parks of the city offer him thousands of victims?”

  “Yeah, that does seem off-base for a regular nut.”

  “It means that he didn’t kill these four people at random, Carter. It means that he had a motive all along, something that linked these people, at least in his twisted mind.”

  “But this last one, Rothman. He’d never been here before. And he only got in town four days ago.”

  “But during those days he visited this section of the city,” Fleming pointed at the map. “And he must have met the killer.”

  Carter produced a list from his pocket. “Here’s everything he did, as near as I can check. He flew in from New York four days ago, checked into the Star. Was seen at the hotel bar that night. Next morning stopped by the hotel physician to get something for a cold. Made three calls the rest of the day, the last one being in our area here. Sp
ent that night in the bar, too. Made four calls the next day, and phoned New York. That night went to two nightclubs, but not to the Fey Club, in case you’re wondering. Yesterday made three more calls, returning to the hotel around six. Shortly after that, the killer apparently visited his room.”

  Fleming grunted. “Did you find any clues in the room?”

  “Just some traces of the dead man’s blood in the shower. As you suspected, the killer had to wash it off his raincoat before he left the room.”

  “Yeah…. But that puts us no nearer to him than before. And soon it’ll be night again.”

  Carter lit a cigarette and stood looking at the map with its four red pins.

  Fleming walked to the window and gazed out at the rain. Wouldn’t it ever stop? Suppose it didn’t, he wondered. Suppose it rained forever….

  Old woman, business man, hoodlum, salesman….

  Kratch, Mitchell, DeLuca, Rothman….

  He looked out at the rain again….

  “You know. Carter, those four did have one thing in common.” But Carter had gone. He was alone in his office.

  He sat down to think about it. The more he thought about it the more fantastic it seemed. His head was beginning to hurt again. This damn dampness….

  He put on his raincoat and went downstairs and walked across the street to the morgue. Doc Adams was just starting the autopsy on Harold Rothman.

  “Find anything, doc?”

  “Nothing yet, except that he was killed with an axe, and I guess you know that.”

  Fleming leaned against the wall as the doctor worked. It was not a pretty thing to watch. “This the first axe killing you’ve examined, doc?”

  “Yeah. The other three were on Doctor Perry’s side of the river.”

  “Tell me, doc, have you had any natural deaths around the same section this week?”

  “Sure, plenty of ’em. People die every day. Now stop asking me questions while I’m working.”

  “Okay, doc.” Fleming moved toward the door. “I was especially interested in a death that maybe wasn’t quite natural….”

  The doc didn’t answer for nearly a minute, and Fleming started out the door.

  “Well, I suppose that one on First Street wasn’t really natural.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “The girl that died from an overdose of morphine….”

  It was shortly after six that evening when Fleming knocked on the door of an apartment on Smith Street, just a few doors away from Sadie Kratch’s house. He was back now, back where it had all started.

  Maybe he should have told Carter or the Commissioner. Maybe he shouldn’t have come here alone….

  But this was his last case…. And this would be the end of it, something to remember when there was nothing else.

  When there was nothing else….

  The door opened slowly, and he faced the killer, the man who had murdered Sadie Kratch, and James Mitchell, and Tony DeLuca, and Harold Rothman….

  They had been just names to Fleming, just as their killer was just a name. Names at the end of a lifetime of this sort of thing. He had not been scared when he captured the two holdup men on that day forty-five years ago. And he was not scared now.

  Even when he saw the axe rise in front of him and begin its slow, deadly arc….

  He simply brushed it aside with his arm, and, surprisingly there was no resistance. The axe clattered to the floor, and the killer of four people, sat down in a chair and began to cry….

  Sometime, for everyone, there is an end. And for the murderer sometime there must be an end to the killing….

  Fleming looked at the man in the chair, still clad in his white druggist’s coat, and felt a little sorry. “Yes, Mr. Wagner,” he said quietly, “I know why you killed all those people….”

  “… you killed them, Mr. Wagner, because they were going to die anyway, because you had made a mistake, the single mistake that every man is entitled to. But the mistake that would have meant the end, for all time, of your profession as a druggist.

  “That’s what I noticed first, of course. That all four of them had a cold when they died. And I began thinking about the cough medicine in Sadie Kratch’s house and the cough medicine that the killer might have removed from Harold Rothman’s hotel room.

  “I thought about the morphine in the old woman, when none was found in the house, and then I learned about the morphine death a few days ago in the same neighborhood….

  “The rest wasn’t too hard to imagine. A lot of people in town had colds, a lot of them called their doctors. And quite a few got prescriptions for cough medicine. So during the past few days, five people came to you for cough medicine. And that was where you made the mistake. You gave them morphine instead of the milder codeine that most cough medicines contain. Morphine’s good for a cough, too, but not in the amount you put in the medicine.

  “The first to die from it was a young girl, and when you saw it in the papers it scared you. You realized you’d made a mistake, and you were afraid the other four would die too, or at least get sick from it. The death of the girl had somehow passed more or less unnoticed, but a series of morphine deaths would be quickly traced to you.

  “So you had to kill the other four, because by confessing your mistake in time to save them, you’d have ruined yourself for life. Your profession was more important than a few lives. It was everything to you.

  “And somehow I understand it. I understand what was in your mind better than anyone else could….

  “Because it’s in my mind, too….

  “Why the axe? I suppose that was some fantastic bit of misdirection to keep attention away from the body, from the stomach, where traces of the morphine could be quickly found. But actually only the old woman took enough for us to notice. Or perhaps you didn’t make the same mistake with the other three after all….

  “My head is aching again. It’s taken me a long time to find you….

  “You tried to make us think it was the work of an insane fiend, but I know you aren’t mad….

  “You just wanted to keep your job.

  “Like I do….

  “Because you know when I bring you in, I’m all through. They’re going to retire me then, like an old horse.

  “There isn’t anything else for me, but they’re going to retire me and this is my last case….

  “Inspector Fleming’s Last Case….

  “Perhaps that’s what the newspapers will call it.

  “Perhaps….

  “My head aches.

  “You killed four people to keep your job … four people….

  “But this doesn’t have to be the end, does it? I’m the only one who knows….

  “Suppose the axe fiend kept on killing….

  “Then I couldn’t retire. Then they’d keep me. Then….

  “Suppose you were to die, Mr. Wagner, the way the others did. Suppose I were to pick up the axe like this and….

  “Suppose….”

  The Man Who Was Everywhere

  HE FIRST NOTICED THE new man in the neighborhood on a Tuesday evening, on his way home from the station. The man was tall and thin, with a look about him that told Ray Bankcroft he was English. It wasn’t anything Ray could put his finger on, the fellow just looked English.

  That was all there was to their first encounter, and the second meeting passed just as casually, Friday evening at the station. The fellow was living around Pelham some place, maybe in that new apartment house in the next block.

  But it was the following week that Ray began to notice him everywhere. The tall Englishman rode down to New York with Ray on the 8:09, and he was eating a few tables away at Howard Johnson’s one noon. But that was the way things were in New York, Ray told himself, where you sometimes ran into the same person every day for a week, as though the laws of probability didn’t exist.

  It was on the weekend, when Ray and his wife journeyed up to Stamford for a picnic, that he became convinced the Englishman was followin
g him. For there, fifty miles from home, the tall stranger came striding slowly across the rolling hills, pausing now and then to take in the beauty of the place.

  “Damn it, Linda,” Ray remarked to his wife, “there’s that fellow again!”

  “What fellow, Ray?”

  “That Englishman from our neighborhood. The one I was telling you I see everywhere.”

  “Oh, is that him?” Linda Bankcroft frowned through the tinted lenses of her sunglasses. “I don’t remember ever seeing him before.”

  “Well, he must be living in that new apartment in the next block. I’d like to know what the hell he’s doing up here, though. Do you think he could be following me?”

  “Oh, Ray, don’t be silly,” Linda laughed. “Why would anyone want to follow you? And to a picnic!”

  “I don’t know, but it’s certainly odd the way he keeps turning up….”

  It certainly was odd.

  And as the summer passed into September, it grew odder still. Once, twice, three times a week, the mysterious Englishman appeared, always walking, always seemingly oblivious of his surroundings.

  Finally, one night on Ray Bankcroft’s way home, it suddenly grew to be too much for him.

  He walked up to the man and asked, “Are you following me?”

  The Englishman looked down his nose with a puzzled frown. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are you following me?” Ray repeated. “I see you everywhere.”

  “My dear chap, really, you must be mistaken.”

  “I’m not mistaken. Stop following me!”

  But the Englishman only shook his head sadly and walked away. And Ray stood and watched him until he was out of sight….

  “Linda, I saw him again today!”

  “Who, dear?”

  “That damned Englishman! He was in the elevator in my building.”

  “Are you sure it was the same man?”

  “Of course I’m sure! He’s everywhere, I tell you! I see him every day now, on the street, on the train, at lunch, and now even in the elevator! It’s driving me crazy. I’m certain he’s following me. But why?”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “I’ve spoken to him, cursed at him, threatened him. But it doesn’t do any good. He just looks puzzled and walks away. And then the next day there he is again.”