Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  That gave me an idea, but I hung it up to dry for a while. I rang headquarters and spilled what had happened to the chief. “Something new—an invisible accident. Right under everybody’s nose and yet nobody saw it. Guess I better stay on it for a while, don’t you?”

  “You park your can on it till it breaks. I’ll let the studio hot-shots know.”

  When I got back to the set they were all there yet—all but Stor-mann and Tobias! “I thought I told you—” I snarled in the guard’s ear.

  “They’ll be right back,” he whined, “they told me so. Stormy only stepped next door to get some more liquor. The electrician that was supplying him ran out of it. And she went to take off her costume. She got jittery because Stormy was nervous and started smoking around her. After what happened to— Besides, they weren’t under arrest. Nobody here is, and you don’t know Stormy. If I’d a’ tried to stop him, it woulda been good-bye to my job—”

  They were back in no time at all. Tobias was back first and I made a mental note of that. Since when does it take a man longer to dig up some liquor than it does a woman to change clothes from head to foot—besides, scraping off a stage make-up in the bargain? That was another little chip stacked against Stormann. I had three of them so far. He hadn’t wanted Meadows to bring me on the set with her. He bullied her into going in alone while my back was turned. And lastly he’d found an excuse for leaving the set, taking him longer to get back than it had a conceited frail, like Tobias, to do herself over from head to toe.

  The ace turned up when I checked up on the electrician who’d been supplying him.

  “Why, no,” he admitted, “I got another bottle left. I told him so, only he got a sudden notion his own was better quality and went out after it.”

  What a dead give-away that was!

  He had the staggers when he showed up, but he had enough decency left to straighten up when he saw me and breathe: “How is she?”

  I made the announcement I’d been saving until he got there—to see how he’d take it.

  “I’m sorry to say—she’s quit.”

  I kept my eyes on him. It was hard to tell. Plop! went the bottle he’d brought in with him and he started folding up like a jack knife. They picked him up and carried him out. It might’ve been the drink—but if he hadn’t wanted to be questioned, for instance, it was the swellest out he could’ve thought up.

  Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I’m frank to admit I stuck a pin in him before they got him to the door—just to see. He never even twitched.

  I turned a chair around backwards, sat down on it, and faced the rest of them. “I’m in charge of this case now,” I said, “by order of police headquarters and with the consent of the studio executives. All I’m going to do, right now, is repeat the question I’ve already asked Mr. Stormann, Miss Tobias, Nellie, and the script-girl. Did any of you see what caused it?” This meant the electricians, stage-hands, and the two cameramen. They all shook their heads.

  I got up and banged the chair down so hard one leg of it busted off. “She wasn’t six feet away from some of you!” I bawled them out. “She was in the full glare of the brightest lights ever devised! All eyes were on her watching every move and she was the center of attraction at the time! She burned to death, and yet no one saw how it started! Twenty-five pairs of human eyes and they might as well have all been closed! Well, there’s one pair left—and they won’t let him down.”

  I suppose they thought I meant my own. Not by a damn sight. “Now clear out of here, all of you, and don’t touch anything as you go!” I pointed to the chief electrician. “You stay and check up on those lights for defects—one of’em might have got overheated and dropped a spark on her. And don’t try to hold out anything to save your own skin. Criminal carelessness is a lot less serious than obstructing an agent of justice!” I passed my handkerchief to the guard. “You comb the floor around where she was standing. Pick up every cigarette butt and every cinder you find!”

  The rest of them filed out one by one, giving me names and addresses as they went. I wasn’t worried about getting them back again if I wanted them. They all reacted differently. Some were frightened, some just curious, some cracking wise. The script-girl’s nose was still buried in her book. She hardly looked up at all. Tobias glided by me with a little extra hip-action and purred over her shoulder: “Lots of luck. Handsome. And if you find out you were mistaken about those eighteen kids of yours, look a lady up sometime.”

  “Thirtieth of next February,” I told her.

  The chief cameraman came out of his booth with a round, flat, tin box—packed under his arm.

  “Where you going with that?” I asked him.

  “Drop it in the ashcan on my way out,” he said. “It’s what we took today, no good now any more.”

  “Ashcan—hell,” I snapped. “Those machines of yours are the other pair of eyes I told you about! How soon can you develop that stuff?”

  “Right away,” he told me, looking surprised. “But we can’t use this roll—it’s got her whole death-scene on it and it’ll turn your hair white just to look at it.”

  “You do it yourself,” I warned him, “don’t call anybody in to help you. And don’t touch it, leave it just the way it is. Can I trust you?”

  “Meet me in half an hour in projection room A,” he said. “She was a swell kid.”

  The electrician came down from way up high somewhere and reported the lights all jake. No crossed wires, not a screw out of place anywhere.

  “You dig up a typewriter and get that all down on paper, sign it, have a notary witness it, and shoot it in to me at headquarters— Galbraith’s the name. It better be on the level, the pay-off is withholding information from the authorities.” Which didn’t mean anything, but it was good enough to throw a scare into him. I never saw anyone take it on the lam so quick in my life.

  The guard passed me my handkerchief back with a cigarette butt, a wire frame, and a lot of little pieces of glass in it.

  “The butt’s Stormann’s,” he pointed out. “He was smoking it after it was all over. I saw him throw it down and step on it before he went after that liquor. I remember because Tobias yapped ‘Don’t come near me with that thing! You want it to happen to me, too?’”

  I wondered if that remark meant anything. Did he want it to happen to her, too? Get the point? I knew what the pieces of glass and the frame were right away—a busted lorgnette like I had seen Tobias Addling with.

  “Meadows had it around her neck I guess,” he suggested, “and it fell and smashed when she started to run around crazy.”

  I felt like telling him he didn’t know his ears from his elbow, but I kept quiet about it. These pieces of glass were clear, that burning celluloid would have smoked them up plenty if they had been anywhere near Martha Meadows. But there was an easy enough way of settling that.

  “Get the wardrobe-woman in here and tell her to bring a complete list of every article she furnished Meadows and Tobias for this picture.”

  She was a society-looking dame, with white hair, and had had her face lifted. She had typewritten sheets with her.

  “Did you supply Meadows with a lorgnette?”

  “Why no,” she said. “Young girls didn’t wear them even in those days.”

  “But Tobias wore one. Is this it?” I showed her the pieces.

  “It must be,” she returned. “She turned in her costume a little while ago and explained that she’d broken her lorgnette while that awful thing was happening to poor Martha. You see I have everything else crossed off but that. We usually charge players for anything that isn’t returned to us, but in this case of course nothing like that will happen.”

  That explained something that had bothered me for a minute or two. Because I’d distinctly seen the lorgnette on Tobias after the accident, when she was making those first passes at me. She must have broken it later—while I was outside in the infirmary with Meadows. But a chiseler like her who would cadge a drink from Stor
mann would try to make them believe it had happened during all the excitement—to get out of paying for it.

  “You keep those two lists just the way they are now, I may want to see them again.” I folded up the handkerchief with the pieces of broken glass and put it away in my pocket.

  A kid came in and said: “The rushes are ready for you in projection room A,” and took me over there.

  It had rows of seats just like a miniature theatre and a screen on one wall. I closed the door and locked the cameraman and myself in.

  “It’s ghastly,” he said, “better hang on tight.”

  “Run it through at normal speed first,” I said. “I’ll see if I can stand it.”

  I sat down in the front row with the screen almost on top of me. There wasn’t much to it at regular speed—about five minutes worth of picture—what they call a “sequence.” It was pretty grisly at that. It opened on Tobias sitting there in the rocker, broadside to the camera. Meadows came in almost at once.

  “I’m going away with him tonight,” she said.

  Tobias opened her lorgnette and gave her the once-over through it. Meadows went over to the window, and the camera followed her part of the way. That left Tobias over at the left-hand side of the screen and partly out of the picture, with just one shoulder, arm, and the side of her head showing. She started to rock back and forth and tap her lorgnette against the back of her hand. I had my eyes glued to Meadows though. She turned around to look at her “sister.”

  “Oh, won’t he ever come?” she said.

  Her face sort of tightened up—changed from repose to tenseness. A look of horror started to form on it, but it never got any further. Right then and there the thing happened.

  The best way I can describe it is, a sort of bright, luminous flower seemed to open up halfway down her dress, spreading, peeling back. But the petals of it were flame. An instant later it was all over her, and the first screams of a voice that was gone now came smashing out at my eardrums. And in between each one, the hellish sound-track had even picked up and recorded the sizzling that her hair made.

  “Cut!”

  I turned around and yelled back at him: “For Pete’s sake, cut, before I throw up!” and I mopped my drenched forehead. “I did— twice—while I was processing it,” he confessed, looking out of the booth at me.

  It hadn’t told me a thing so far, but then I hadn’t expected it to—the first throw out of the bag.

  “Go back and start it over,” I shivered, “but, whatever you do, leave out that finale! Take it up where she turns at the window. Slow-motion this time. Can you hold it when I tell you to?”

  He adjusted his apparatus. “Say when,” he called.

  The figures on the screen hardly moved at all this time, eight times slowed down. They drifted lazily—sort of floated. I knew the place to look for on Meadows’ dress now, and I kept my eyes focussed on it and let everjrthing else ride. A moment later something had shown up there.

  “Hold it!” I yelled, and the scene froze into a “still.”

  Now it was just a magic-lantern slide, no motion at all. I left my seat and stood close up against the screen, keeping to one side so my own shadow wouldn’t blur out that place on her dress. No flame was coming from it yet. It was just a bright, luminous spot, about the size and shape of a dime.

  “Back up one!” I instructed. “One” meant a single revolution of the camera. The scene hardly shifted at all, but the pin-point of light was smaller—like a pea now. You couldn’t have seen it from the seat I’d been in at first.

  Two heads are better than one. I called him out and showed it to him. “What do you make of this? It’s not a defect in the film, is it?”

  “No, it’s a blob of light coming to a head at that place on her dress. Like a highlight, you might say. A gleam.” Which is what I’d had it figured for, too.

  “Gro three forward,” I said, “and then hold it.”

  He came out again to look. It was back to the size of a dime again, and only a turn or two before the flames were due to show up.

  “There’s heat in it!” I said. “See that!”

  The white spot had developed a dark core, a pin-head of black or brown.

  “That’s the material of the dress getting ready to bum. See that thread coming out of the dot? Smoke—and all there’ll ever be of it, too. Celluloid doesn’t give much warning.”

  So far so good. But what I wanted to know was where that gleam or ray was coming from. I had the effect now, but I wanted the cause. The trouble was you couldn’t follow the beam through the air—to gauge its direction. Like any beam of light, it left no trail—only showed up suddenly on her dress. The set-up, so far, seemed to fit Nellie’s theory of spontaneous combustion perfectly. Maybe one of the powerful Klieg lights, high overhead and out of the picture, had developed some flaw in its glass shield, warping one of its rays. But the electrician had gone over them afterward and given them all a clean bill of health.

  “Start it up again,” I said wearily. “Slow motion,” and went back and sat down. I was farther away now and had a better perspective of the thing as a whole; maybe that’s what did it.

  As the scene on the screen thawed and slowly dissolved into fluid motion once more, it gave the impression for a moment of everything on it moving at once. Therefore it was only natural that the one thing that didn’t move should catch my eye and hold it. Tobias’ lorgnette, and the wrist and hand that held it. The three objects stayed rigid, down in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, after ever^hing else was on the go once more. The chair she was in had started to rock slowly back and forth, and her body with it, but the forearm, wrist, hand and lorgnette stayed poised, motionless. There was something unnatural about it that caught the eye at once. I remembered she had opened the scene by tapping her lorgnette as well as rocking.

  Now, with the fire due to break out any second, she was only rocking. The lorgnette was stiff as a ramrod in her grasp. Not that she was holding it out at full length before her or anything like that, she was holding it close in, unobtrusively, but straight up and down—a little out to one side of her own body. Maybe the director’s orders had been for her to stop fiddling with it at a certain point. Then again maybe not. All I wanted to find out was at what point she had stopped tapping and playing with it. I had been concentrating on Meadows until now and had missed that.

  “Whoa, back up!” I called out to him. “All the way back and then start over—slow.”

  I let Meadows go this time and kept my eye on Tobias and her lorgnette. The minute I saw it stop—“Hold it!” I yelled and ran over to the screen and examined Meadows’ dress. Nothing yet. But in three more revolutions of the camera that deadly white spot had already showed up on the celluloid-lined hoopskirt. Effect had followed cause too quickly to be disregarded.

  “Lights!” I roared. “I’ve got it!”

  He turned a switch, the room blazed all around me, and I took that handkerchief out of my pocket and examined the pieces of glass it held. Some were thicker than others—the lens had therefore been convex, not flat. I held one up and looked at my cuff through it. The weave stood out. A magnifying glass. I held it about a foot away from the back of my hand, where I’d already been burned once this afternoon, and even with the far weaker lights of the projection-room working through it, in about thirty seconds something bit me and I jumped.

  He’d come out and was watching what I was doing. “Pack that film up again in the box the way you had it,” I said. “I’ll be back for it in a minute. I’m taking it down to headquarters with me!”

  “What’d you find out?” he asked.

  “Look it up in tomorrow morning’s papers!”

  I called Tobias’ dressing-room. “How’s the lay of the land?” I greeted her.

  She knew me right away. “I know, it’s Handsome.”

  “I was wrong about those eighteen kids,” I told her. “I counted ‘em over—only nine.”

  She sure was a hard-boiled custome
r. “Nine to go,” she said cheer-ftilly. “When will I see you?”

  “I’ll pick you up in about twenty minutes.”

  “Where we going?” she cooed when she got in the car.

  “You’ll find out.”

  Then when we got there, she said: “Why, this looks like police headquarters to me.”

  “Not only does, but is,” I told her. “Won’t take a minute, I just want to see a man about a dog.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather have me wait outside for you?”

  I chucked her under the chin. “I’m getting so fond of you I want you with me wherever I go. Can’t stand being without you even for five minutes.”

  She closed her eyes and looked pleased and followed me in like a lamb. Then when the bracelets snapped on her wrists she exploded: “Why you dirty doublecrossing—I thought you said you wanted to see a man about a dog.”

  “I do,” I said, “and you’re the dog.”

  “What’re the charges?” the chief asked.

  “Setting fire to Martha Meadows with a magnifying glass and causing her to bum to death. Here’s the glass she used; picked up on the set. Here’s the original harmless glass that was in the frame before she knocked it out; picked up in the trashbasket in her dressing room. The film, there in the box, shows her in the act of doing it. She’s been eaten away with jealousy ever since she faded out and Meadows stepped into her shoes.”

  I never knew a woman knew so many bad words as she did; and she used them all. After she’d been booked and the matron was leading her away she called back: “You’ll never make this stick. You think you’ve got me, but you’ll find out!”

  “She’s right, Gal,” commented the chief, after she’d gone. “The studio people’ll put the crusher on the case before it ever comes up for trial. Not because they approve of what she’s done—but on account of the effect it would have on the public.”

  “She may beat the murder rap,” I said, “but she can’t get around these.” I took a bundle of letters and a square of blotting-paper out of my pocket and passed them to him. “Wrote them in her very dressing room at the studio and then mailed them to Meadows on the outside, even after Meadows had gotten her a job. The blotting-paper tells the story if you hold it up to a mirror. She didn’t get rid of it quickly enough.”