Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  Maybe this was just a coincidence, but all the same I kept digging at it.

  “Did he recognize you?”

  He nodded.

  “What did he say when he first saw you?”

  He’d smiled jovially at Eddie and said, “Young fellow, are you following me around?” Then he’d given him a five-dollar tip.

  “Pretty big tip, wasn’t it?”

  Yes, but then at the San Pablo, Eddie recalled, he had once given him a ten-dollar one. This was getting interesting.

  “Whew!” I said. ” What for?”

  Eddie smiled a little.

  Something about a woman, as I might know. “Better tell me about it,” I urged.

  One night about one o’clock, his message ran, a young woman who acted kind of nervous had got on the car and asked Eddie which floor Dr. Avalon was on. So he took her to the door and showed her. But it was a long hallway and before he could get back to the cage again, Avalon had let her in and he heard him say in a loud voice: “You shouldn’t have come here! I don’t see anybody here! You should have seen me in my office tomorrow.”

  And she had answered, “But I had to see you!”

  Well, Eddie had thought it was the usual thing, some kind of a love affair going on. But about half an hour later he was called back to the floor and when he got up there he found Avalon standing waiting for him, all excited, his face running with sweat, and he shoved a piece of paper with something written on it at him and told him to run out and find an all-night drugstore and bring back some medicine as quickly as he could.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” he said. “Every minute counts!”

  Eddie did, and when he got back with it he knocked on the door, but not very loudly because he didn’t want to wake up people in the other rooms. The doctor must have been too excited to pay any attention because he didn’t come to the door right away, so Eddie tried the knob, found that it had been left open, and walked in. He saw the doctor’s visitor stretched out on a table with a very white light shining down on her and a sheet or something over her. Then the doctor came rushing over at him and for a minute he thought he was going to kill him, he looked so terrible.

  “Get out of here, you!” he yelled at him. “What do you mean by coming in here?” and practically threw him out of the door.

  About an hour later the young lady and the doctor showed up together and rode down in Eddie’s car as cool and collected as if nothing had happened. The doctor showed her to a taxi at the door, and it was when he came in and rode upstairs again that he gave Eddie the ten dollars, saying he was sorry he had lost his head like that, but she had had a very bad heart attack and it was lucky he had pulled her through.

  “Did he ask you not to say anything?”

  Eddie nodded, and again smiled a little sheepishly. But I knew he didn’t get the point at all. He thought it was just some love affair that the doctor wanted kept quiet. I knew better. The man was a shady doctor and ran the risk of imprisonment day and night.

  “Then what happened?”

  Eddie hadn’t opened his mouth at all to anyone, but not long after some men had come around and stopped at the desk and asked questions about the doctor, men wearing iron hats and chewing cigars in the comer of their mouths, and when they learned he wasn’t in they said they’d come back next day. But before they did the doctor had left, bag and baggage. Eddie said he never saw anyone leave in such a hurry. It was at five thirty in the morning and Eddie was still on duty.

  “Did he say anjrthing to you?”

  No, he had just looked at him kind of funny, and Eddie hadn’t known what to make of it.

  I did, though. I was beginning to see things clearer and clearer every moment. I was beginning to have a little trouble with my breathing, it kept coming faster all the time.

  “Time’s up,” said the nurse from the doorway.

  “Not yet it isn’t,” I told her. “I’m not going to have to do any questioning after today, so back out while I take a couple minutes more to wind it all up.” I turned to Eddie. “And when you ran into him again at the Lyons he said ‘Young fellow, are you following me around?’, did he? And smiled at you, did he? And gave you a finif tip for no reason at all, did he?”

  Eddie nodded three times.

  I clenched my teeth tight. I had everything I needed, knew all I wanted to, and yet—I couldn’t have made the slimmest charge stick and I knew it; I didn’t have any evidence. A ten-dollar tip, a hasty departure, an everyday wisecrack like “Are you following me around?”—you can’t bring charges against anyone on the strength of those alone.

  “What’s he like?” I asked.

  Short and dumpy, came the answer. He wore a black beard, not the bushy kind, but curly and trimmed close to his face.

  “Did he always have it?”

  Not at the San Pablo, no. He’d only had a mustache there, but he’d grown the beard after he moved to the Lyons.

  Just in case, I thought, the cigar-chewing gentlemen with the iron hats showed up again. That wasn’t very clever. Something told me that this Dr. Avalon was not quite right in his head—which made the whole thing all the more gruesome. Frozen-face’s gangsters were angels of light and sweetness compared to a maniac like this.

  “Did he ever act a little strangely, I mean different from other people, as far as you could notice?”

  No, except that he seemed absent-minded and used to smile a lot about nothing at all.

  I only asked Eddie one more question. “What was his room number at the Lyons?”

  He didn’t know for sure, but he had always taken him up to the eighth floor.

  I got up to go.

  “I won’t be in to see you tomorrow,” I told him casually. “I’m going to drop by the hotel and collect the half week’s wages they still owe you.” But there was a far bigger debt than that I was going to collect for him. “In case I don’t get around for the next few days, I’ll have the wife stay with you to keep you company. Not a tumble to her or to those two flatfeet, either, the next time they come around on one of their semi-annual visits.”

  I think he knew. He just looked at me and narrowed his eyes down, and we shook hands hard.

  “Don’t worry, Eddie, everjrthing’s under control—now.”

  IV

  When I got back to my own house I put the revolver in an empty suitcase and carried it out with me. From there I stopped off at the shop and put in several lengths of copper wire and an awl and a screwdriver and some metal disks and a little black soundbox with some batteries inside it, something on the order of a telephone base-board. I also put in several other little tools and gadgets you’d have to be a master electrician to know an3rthing about. I told my assistant to keep things running, that I was going out to wire a concert hall, and I rode down to the Hotel Lyons and checked in. I signed the register “T, Mallory, Buffalo,” and told them I was very particular about where I slept. The seventh floor wasn’t quite high enough, and the ninth floor was just a little too high. How about something on the eighth? So they gave me 802.1 didn’t even know if he was still in the hotel at all, but it was taking too much of a chance to ask; he might have gotten wind of it. So I paid for three days in advance and said: “Don’t be surprised if I ask you to change me in a day or two. I’m a very hard customer to please.” Which was perfectly all right with them, they told me.

  When I got up to the room I just put the valise down without unpacking it and killed a little time, and then I went downstairs with a newspaper in my pocket and grabbed a chair in the lobby that faced the entrance and sat there from then on. From six until eleven I sat there like that with the paper spread out in front of my face. I never turned a page of it because that would have covered over the two little eye-holes I’d made in it with the point of a pencil. At eleven-thirty they started to put the lights out around me and I couldn’t stay there any longer without attracting attention. So I got up and went up to my room. He’d never shown up. For all I knew he’d beat it right after—what he did
to Eddie; maybe he wasn’t even living in the building any more. I had to find out and find out quick, otherwise I was just wasting my time. But how, without asking openly? And I couldn’t do that, it would give me away.

  In the morning I thought of a way, and it worked. I remembered a song of years back that strangely enough had the same name as the man I was tracking down—Avalon. When the chambermaid came in to clean up the room I got busy and started singing it for all I was worth. I didn’t know the words and I didn’t know the music, so I faked it, but I put in plenty of Avalon. She was a friendly old soul and stood there grinning at me.

  “Like it?” I said.

  “What’s it supposed to be?” she asked.

  “It’s called Avalon,” I said. “Isn’t that a funny name for a song?”

  “It is,” she admitted. “We got a doctor in this hotel by the same name.”

  I laughed as though I didn’t believe her.

  “What room is he in?” I asked skeptically.

  “815,” she said. “He’s a permanent, that’s how I know his name.”

  I went down to the desk and said: “I didn’t sleep a wink last night; you’ve got to give me something else.”

  The clerk unfolded a floor-plan and we began to consult it together. 815,1 saw at a glance, was a suite of two-rooms-and-a-bath, at the end of the hallway. It sealed it up like the cross-bar of a T. All the others were singles, lying on each side of the hallway; only two of them, therefore, adjoined it.

  I pointed to one. “That’s a nice layout. 814. How about that?”

  They had someone in there.

  “Or this?” I put my finger on 813.

  No good either.

  “What’s it worth to you to put me in one of those two rooms?” I said abruptly. “I’ll double the rate if you switch me in and move the other tenant elsewhere.”

  He gave me a funny look, as if to say, “What’re you up to?” but I didn’t care.

  “I’m a crank,” I said. “At home I sleep on three mattresses.” I handed him a cigar wrapped in a five-spot and half an hour later I was in 814 and had the door locked.

  I spent the next half hour after that sounding out the wall, the one between me and him, with my knuckles and my eardrum. I had to go easy, because I didn’t know whether he was in the room or not at the time and I didn’t want to arouse his suspicions.

  Just when I was wondering whether I should take a chance or not and go ahead, I got a break. The telephone on the other side of the wall, his telephone, started to ring. All that came through to where I was was a faint, faraway tinkle. It kept on for awhile and then it quit of its own accord. But it told me two things that I wanted to know very badly. It told me he wasn’t there to answer it, and it gave me a very good idea of just how thick the wall was. It was too thick to hear anything through, it needed fixing. I opened my suitcase, got out my tools, and got busy drilling and boring. I kept my ears open the whole time because I knew I’d have to quit the minute I heard him open his door and come in. But he never did. He must have been out for the day.

  I finished a little before four in the afternoon. Finished on my side of the wall, anyway. I had the tiny hole bored all the way through, the wiring strung through and the soundbox screwed in behind a radiator where it wasn’t noticeable. I swept up all the little specks of plaster in my handkerchief and dropped them out the window. You couldn’t notice anything unless you looked very closely. But I had to get in on the other side, his side of the wall, and hook up the little disk, the “mike,” before it would work. Without that it was dead, no good at all.

  The set-up, I had better explain, was not a dictaphone. It didn’t record anything, all it did was amplify the sounds it picked up in his room and bring them through into mine, the way a loudspeaker would. In other words, it was no good as evidence without a witness. But to hell with witnesses and all legal red tape! I was out to pay him back for Eddie and I figured he’d be too clever for me if it came to an open arraignment in a criminal court. I didn’t have anything on him that a smart enough lawyer couldn’t have blown away like a bunch of soap-bubbles, and yet I could have sworn on a stack of Bibles that he was the guy I was looking for.

  The next step was to get in there. I examined the outside of my window, which faced the same way as his, but that was no good. Neither of them had a fire-escape or even a ledge to cross over by. It was also pretty late in the afternoon by now and he might be coming in any minute. Much as I hated to waste another night, I figured I would have to put it off until the morning. Of course, I was taking a chance on his noticing any small grains of mortar or plaster that might have fallen to the floor on his side. But that couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t very likely anyway, I consoled myself It was one of those thousand-to-one shots that life is full of.

  I didn’t undress at all that night or go to bed. I kept pacing back and forth on the carpet, stopping every few minutes to listen at the door and at the wall. There wasn’t a sound the whole night through. Nobody came and nobody went. 815 might have been vacant for all the signs of life it gave.

  In the morning the same chambermaid as before came to make the room up. I mussed up the bed just before she came in so it looked as if it had been slept in. When she was through she went into 815 and left the door ajar after her. House-regulations, I suppose. It was a two-room suite, remember.

  I gave her about five minutes to get through with one of the rooms—either one, it didn’t matter—and then I stole out of my room, closed the door after me, and edged up to the door of 815 until I could look in. If anyone coming along the corridor had seen me I was going to pretend she had forgotten to leave towels in my room and I was looking for her. She was in the living room. It was even easier than I had expected, because she was running a baby vacuum-cleaner across the floor and the buzz it made drowned out my footsteps.

  I waited until she had her back to me and then I gave a quick jump in through the door and past her line of vision. The bed in the bedroom was made up, so I knew she was through in there and wouldn’t come back again. I ducked down behind a big stuffed chair and waited. I had the copper disk, the rubber mat it went on, and the tools I needed in the side pocket of my coat.

  I began to get cramped squatting down on my heels, but after awhile she got through and went out. I waited another minute or two after that, and then I got up, slipped into the living room and got to work. One good thing, there wasn’t much noise to this part of the job, I had done all the drilling and pecking from my side. If he came in and caught me at it I was going to pretend I was the hotel elecrician and had been ordered to put in a new outlet or something. The trouble was I wasn’t dressed for the part, and being a permanent in the hotel he might know the real electrician by sight. It occurred to me, now that it was too late, that I should have had the revolver with me instead of leaving it behind in my own room like a fool.

  But I was through in no time at all. All I had to do was get hold of the ends of the wire, draw them the rest of the way through the hole, hook them onto the disk, and screw the disk onto the baseboard of the wall. It was no bigger than a coffee saucer, still it was coppery and bright. But I fixed that by shifting a chair over in front of it. In five minutes I was through. It was still dead, but all it needed now was to be grounded on one of the light fixtures in my own room. I let myself out, went back there, and did it. Now I was all set.

  V

  I went out and got some food, and then when I was through eating I did a funny thing. I went into a butcher shop to buy some more. But I knew what I was doing.

  “I want a lamb’s tongue,” I told him. “Look in your icebox and bring me out the smallest one you’ve got.”

  When he did it was still too big.

  “Cut it down,” I said. “Just the tip and not much more.”

  He looked at me as though I was crazy, but he went ahead and did it. Then he took a nice clean piece of waxpaper and started wrapping it up.

  “No, not that,” I told him. “Find a piece w
ith a lot of blood on it, all smeary, and wrap it in that. Then put a clean piece around the outside of it.”

  I took it back with me in my pocket, and when I got up to my room I wrote “Dr. Avalon” in pencil on the outside of it. Then I put it down outside his door, as if a delivery boy had left it there, and went back into my room and waited.

  Now I was going to know for sure. If he had nothing on his conscience and came home and found that there, he wouldn’t think anything of it—he’d think it was either a practical joke or that somebody else’s order had been left at his door by mistake. But if he had a guilty conscience this was going to catch him off his guard and make him give himself away; he wouldn’t be able to help it. It wouldn’t have been human not to—even if it was only for a minute or two. And if there was anyone else in on it with him—and I had a hunch there was—the first thing he’d think of would be to turn to them for help and advice in his panic and terror. So I waited, stretched out on my bed, with the revolver in my pocket and my head close to the wall apparatus.

  He came in around six. I heard his door open and then close again, and I jumped off the bed and took a peek through my own door. The package was gone, he’d taken it in with him. I went back and listened in. I could hear the paper crackling while he unwrapped it as clearly as if it had been in my own room. Then there was a gasp—the sound a man suffering from asthma makes trying to get his breath back. Then, plop! He had dropped it in his fright. The wiring was working without a hitch; I wasn’t missing a thing.

  After that I heard the clink of a glass. He was pouring himself a drink. It clinked again right after that, and then I heard him give sort of a moan. That was a dead giveaway; a man doesn’t take two drinks to keep his courage up just because the butcher has left the wrong order at his door. He’d done that to my brother all right, he and nobody else. More rage and hate went through me than I ever thought I had in me. I could feel my lower jaw quivering as if I was a big dog getting ready to take a bite out of somebody. I had to hang on to the sides of the bed to stay where I was a little longer.