Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  (1934)

  Walls That Hear You

  When the poHcemain came to the door and eisked if Eddie Mason hved there I knew right away something had happened to him. They always break it to you that way.

  “Yeah. I’m his brother.”

  “Better come down and see him,” he said. I got my hat and went with him.

  Eddie was in the emergency ward of the Mount Eden Hospital, he told me. He’d been found lying on his back on a lonely stretch of road out toward White Plains, slowly bleeding away.

  “What is it, hit and run?” I cried, grabbing him by the sleeve.

  He didn’t want to tell me at first. Then, just before we got there he said, “Well, you may as well know now as later, I guess.” Eddie’s tongue had been torn out by the roots and all ten of his fingers had been cut off at the base, leaving just the stumps of both hands.

  I went all weak at the pit of my stomach when I heard it. And then when I got the full implication of the thing, it was even worse. That poor kid. Just turned twenty. Yesterday with his life all before him. And now he’d never be able to speak another word as long as he lived, never be able to feed himself or dress himself or earn a decent living after this.

  “He’d have been better off dead!” I groaned. “What did it?” I kept saying. “What was it?”

  “I don’t know,” said the cop sadly. “I’m just a sidewalk-flattener with the pleasant job of breaking these things to people.”

  Eddie hadn’t come to yet, so just standing there looking at him didn’t do much good. It broke my heart, though. One of the doctors gave me a good stiff drink of whiskey and tried to be encouraging.

  “He’ll pull through,” he said. “No doubt about it. We’ve made a prelimineiry examination, and I don’t even think we’ll have to resort to blood transfusion. What saved him more than anjrthing else were the makeshift bandages that were found on him. If it hadn’t been for them he’d have been a goner long before he was picked up.”

  This went over my head at the time. I didn’t understand. I thought he meant their own bandages, the hospital’s.

  A couple of detectives had already been sissigned to the case from the moment the cop who had found him had phoned in his report. Why wouldn’t they be? No car has ever yet been designed so that it can rip the tongue out of a man’s mouth without leaving a scratch on the rest of his face. Or deposit him neatly on the side of the road, with his feet close together and his hat resting on his stomach as if he were dozing. There wasn’t a bruise on him except the mutilations. They were waiting in the other room to talk to me when I came out of the ward, looking like a ghost.

  “You his brother?”

  “Yes, damn it!” I burst out. “And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!”

  “Fimny,” said a dick dryly, “but so do we.”

  I didn’t like him much after that. Sarcasm is out of place when a man hais just been brought face to face with personal tragedy.

  First they told me what they already knew about Eddie, then they had me fill in the rest for them. There wasn’t very much of either. I mean that had any bearing on this.

  “He runs the elevator at the Hotel Lyons, works the late shift alone, from midnight to six in the morning,” I explained.

  “We checked down there already. He never showed up at all last night; they had to use the night watchman as a substitute on the car. What time did he leave your house to go to work last night?”

  “Same time ais always. Quarter to twelve.”

  “That don’t give him much time, does it?” remarked my pet aversion irrelevantly.

  My nerves were raw and I felt like snapping, “That’s no reason why he should be half torn to pieces,” but instead I said, “He only has two express stops to go, the hotel’s on Seventy-second.”

  “How do you know he rode?”

  ‘1 can give you a lead on that,” I offered. ‘The station agent down there knows him—^by sight, anyway. Kelsey’s his name. Ask him if he saw him come up last night at the usual time or not.” He went out to find a phone. “He don’t know his name,” I called after him wamingly, “so just say the young fellow fi*om the Hotel Lyons he let pass through one time when he’d lost all his change through a hole in his pocket.”

  “Not bad,” remarked his mate admiringly while we were waiting, “You’ve got a good head. Mason. What do you do?”

  “Master electrician. Fve got my own store on upper Amsterdam.”

  The other one came back and said, “I had to wake him up at home, but he knew who I meant right away. Yeah, your brother came through the turnstile about five of twelve. Says he flipped his hand up and said, ‘Hello, you bird in a gilded cage.’”

  “Well,” I said, and my voice broke, “then it’s a cinch he still had—^his voice and his—fingers when he got out of the train. And it’s another cinch it didn’t happen to him between the station and the hotel. It’s right on the comer, that hotel is, and it’s one of the busiest comers on Broadway. Looks like the management gave you a bum steer aind he did go to work aft«r all.”

  “No, that was on the up-and-up. They were even sore about it at first, imtil we told them he was in the hospital.”

  “What were those sandwiches doing in his pocket?” the other one asked. “Looks like he stopped off somewhere first to buy food. They were still on him when he was found, one in each pocket.”

  “No, my wife fixed them for him to take with him aind eat on the job,” I said. “She did that every night.” I looked the other way so they wouldn’t see my eyes get cloudy. “I saw him shove them in his coat before he left the house. Now they’ll be feeding him through a tube, most likely.”

  “Any way you look at it,” said the first one, “it nsirrows down to about five minutes in time and twenty or thirty yards in distance. He was seen leaving the station. He never got to the hotel. With lights all around as bright as day. Why, he didn’t even have to go all the way across the street—^the station’s on ain island in the middle!”

  “What’s the good of all that?” said the one I didn’t like. “We won’t get anywhere until we find out from him himself. He knows better than anyone else what happened after he came out of the station. He’s the only one can tell us; we’ll just have to sit tight until he’s able to—”

  “Tell!” I exclaimed bitterly. “How is he going to tell anybody anjrthing after this, with no voice left and without being able to hold a pencil to paper!”

  “There are ways,” he said. He flagged a nurse who had just stepped out of the ward. “When are you people going to let us at young Mason?”

  “Right now, if you want to finish the job,” she snapped back at him. “He’s out of his head from shock and loss of blood. But go right in if you want to make it a murder case; maybe you’d rather handle one of those. However, if you’ll hold your horses and give us a chance to pull him through, maybe you can see him by tomorrow or the day after.”

  I saw the other one, Kane, grin behind his hand. She certainly had character, that person, whoever she was. He turned back to me again after that. “I don’t want to make you feel bad. Mason, but we’ve had cases like this before. And the answer is always pretty much the same. Your brother probably got in with the wrong crowd and knew a little more than he should’ve. Who’d he run around with, any idea?”

  “No one, good, bad or indifferent. If it’s gangs you’re thinking of you can drop that angle right now. He wasn’t that kind; he didn’t have the time. Know what that kid was doing? Working nights at the hotel, sleeping mornings, helping me out in the shop afternoons, and going to night school three times a week in the bargain! The couple of evenings he had left over he usually took his girl to the movies. He was no slouch, he wanted to get somewhere. And now look at him!” I turned away. “If they’d only broken his leg, or knocked out his teeth, or anjrthing—an3rthing but what they did do! I’m going home and drink myself to sleep, I can’t stand thinking about it any more.”

  Kane gav
e me a slap on the back in silent sympathy. Pain-in-the-face said, “We’ll want you on hand tomorrow when we try to question him; you might be some help.”

  II

  I was with him long before they were, from the minute they’d let me in until they told us we all had to go. About all the poor kid could talk with were his eyes, and he worked them overtime. They seemed to bum out at me sometimes, and I figured I understood what he meant.

  “We’ll straighten it out, Eddie,” I promised him grimly. “We’ll get even on them—whoever they are. We’ll see that they get what’s coming to them!”

  He nodded his head like wild and his eyes got wet, and the nurse gave me a dirty look for working him up.

  Kane and his partner were only allowed fifteen minutes with him that first day, which was a hell of a long time at that, considering that the amputations had taken place less than forty-eight hours before. The questioning fell completely flat, just as I had expected it to. He was as completely shut off from all of us as though there was a wall built around him. The only kind of questions he could answer were those that took “yes” or “no” for an answer—by shaking his head up and down or from side to side—and that limited them to about one out of every ten that they wanted to put to him. I saw red when I saw how helpless he was. It was later that same afternoon that I dug up that permit I’d had ever since two years before when my shop was held up, and went out and bought a revolver with it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I knew what I wanted to do with it—given the right person!

  But to go back: “Did you see who did it to you?”

  No, he shook.

  “Well, have you any idea who it could be?”

  No again.

  “Been in any trouble with anyone?”

  No.

  “Well, where did it happen to you?”

  He couldn’t answer that, naturally, so they had to shape it up for him. But it wouldn’t go over, no matter how they put it. He kept shrugging his shoulders, as if to say he didn’t know himself. His face got all white with the effort he was making to express himself and when the nurse had examined him and found out that bleeding had set in again inside his mouth, she lost her temper and told us to get out and please question somebody else if we had to ask questions. Eddie was in a faint on the pillows when she closed the door after us. That was when I went out and bought the gun, swearing under my breath.

  Kane and Frozen-face showed up the next day with a couple of those charts that opticians use for testing the eyes, with capital letters all scrambled up, big at the top and getting smaller all the way down. Instead of questioning him directly any more, they had him spell out what he wanted to say letter by letter. Deadpan pointing them out on the chart and Kane jotting them down on a piece of paper—providing Eddie nodded yes—until he had complete words and sentences made up out of them. But it was as slow and tedious as teaching a cross-eyed mental defective the alphabet. The first two or three letters sometimes gave a clue to what word he had in mind: for instance, H, O meant that “hotel” was coming and they could save time and skip the T, E, L part. But others weren’t as easy as all that to figure out, and then every once in awhile they would get one all wrong and have to go back and start it over.

  Well, when they were all through—and it took three or four full half-hour sessions—they were practically back where they had started from. Eddie, it turned out, was as much in the dark as the rest of us were. He had been unconscious the whole time, from a minute after leaving the subway station that night until he came to in the hospital bed where he was now, the next morning.

  This was his story. Just as he got past Kelsey’s ticket window in the subway station the green lights flashed on and he had to stand there waiting before he could get across to the other side of the half-roadway. He wasn’t a heavy smoker, but as he was standing there waiting for the traffic to let up he absent-mindedly lit a cigarette. Then, when he got over and was ready to go in the hotel, he noticed what he’d done. The management was very strict about that; they didn’t allow the employees to smoke, not even in the locker-room, on pain of dismissal. Being an economical kid he hated to throw it away right after he’d begun it. The big sidewalk clock that stood out in front of the hotel said seven to twelve—the clock must have been a couple of minutes slow—so he decided to take a turn around the block and finish the cigarette before he went in.

  And another thing, he admitted—there was a laugh and a tear in this if you’ve ever been twenty—he didn’t want to “spoil” the fellow he was relieving for the night by getting in too much ahead of time. So up the side-street he turned, killing time while he finished his cigarette.

  It was dark and gloomy, after the glare of Broadway, and there wasn’t anyone on it at that hour. But from one end to the other of it there was a long, unbroken line of cars parked up against the sidewalk. They seemed to be empty; in any case he didn’t pay any attention to them. Halfway up the block he stopped for a moment to throw the cigarette away, and as he did so something soft was thrown up against his face from behind. It was like a hand holding a big, square folded handkerchief.

  There hadn’t been a sound behind him, not even a single footfall. It was done so easily, gently almost, that for a moment he wasn’t even frightened but thought that it must be something like a rag or piece of goods that had fallen out of some window up above and blown up against his face. Then when he tried to raise his hand and brush it away, he felt something holding it. And he started to feel lazy and tired all over.

  Then he felt himself being drawn backwards, like a swimmer caught in a current, but when he tried to pull away and fight off whatever it was that was happening to him, it was too late. Instead of being able to get any air in his lungs, all he kept breathing was something sweet and sickly, like suffocating flowers, and after that he didn’t know any more. When he woke up he was in agony in the hospital.

  Kane got a little vial of chloroform from the nurse and wet the stopper and held it near Eddie’s face.

  “Was that it? Was that what it smelt like?”

  He got wild right away and tried to back his head away and nodded yes like a house afire and made growling sounds deep in his throat that went through me like a knife.

  III

  The three of us went outside to talk it over.

  “Mistaken identity,” decided Kane. “Whoever was waiting in that car expected somebody else to go by and thought they had him when they jumped on the kid. That’s all I can make of it. Either they never found out their mistake until it was too late, or else they did but went ahead and did it anyway, afraid he’d give way on them. It’s not fool-proof, but it’s the best I can do.”

  “It’s as full of holes as a Swiss cheese,” his partner told him disgustedly. “It’s like I told you before. The kid knows and he’s not telling. He talked too much, got a little present for it from somebody, and now he’s learned his lesson and isn’t making the same mistake twice.” He took the penciled sheets from Kane and shuffled through them. “It don’t hang together. Chloroform my eye! Husky twenty-year-olds don’t stand still waiting to go bye-bye like that. It don’t get them that quick; their wind’s too good. He was politely invited to step into that car by someone he knew and he didn’t dare refuse. What they did after proves it. Why the tongue and the fingers? For talking. You can’t get around that.”

  I had stood all of that I could.

  “Listen,” I flamed, “are you on a job to get whoever did it, or are you on a job to stand up for ‘em and knock my brother?”

  “Watch yourself,” he said. “I don’t like that.”

  Kane came between us and gave me the wink with one eye. I suppose he gave his partner the wink with the other eye at the same time; peacemakers usually do.

  Poison-mouth would have the last word, though. “If your brother would open up and give us a tip or two instead of holding out, we’d probably have the guy we want by this time.”

  “And what if he’d been a stiff a
nd couldn’t tip you off?” I squelched him. “Does that mean the guy would beat the rap altogether?”

  It was probably this little set-to more than anything else that first put the idea in my mind of working on my own hook on Eddie’s behalf. Kane’s partner had him down for a gangster more or less. I knew that he wasn’t. I wanted to get even for him, more than I ever wanted anything before in my life.

  Let them tackle it in their own way! I’d do a little work on the side. I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to do—then or for some time afterwards. All I knew was whoever did that to Eddie wasn’t going to get away with it—not if it took me the rest of my life to catch up with them.

  They had left the charts behind while they were out rounding up small-time racketeers and poolroom-lizards that had never heard of Eddie, and I worked over them with him daily. We got so that we could handle them much faster than in the beginning.

  And then one day, out of all the dozens, the hundreds of questions I kept throwing at him, the right one popped out. The minute I asked it, even before he gave me the answer, I knew I had hit something. I wondered why I hadn’t asked it long ago.

  He had worked at another hotel called the San Pablo before going to the Lyons. But this had been quite awhile before.

  “None of the guests from there ever turned up later at the Lyons while you were there, did they?” I asked.

  Yes, one did, he spelled back. His name was Dr. Avalon. He’d left the San Pablo before Eddie himself did, and then when Eddie got the job at the Lyons he found he’d moved there ahead of him, that was all.