Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  When I opened my eyes, the record was still on the turntable. You’d think the first thing I’d do would be to take a look under the lid and make sure. But I didn’t go near it for a long time, and when I finally did I didn’t feel much like crowing. I stood there holding it in my hand. Such a fragile thing! All I had to do was just let it fall, just let it slip out of my fingers and—goodbye. I thought of Jackie, then I put it down and ran to the phone as if I was scared of my life. Ran isn’t the word—flew. I got Westman at his office, told him I had what he needed.

  “Swell, bring it down,” he tried to tell me.

  “I can’t, you’d better come up and get it! Quick, right now! Jump in a cab, don’t give me time to think it over. Hurry, will you, hurry, before I—”

  He came all right. He stripped off a pillowcase and slipped the record in that. “I’ll get Albany on the wire,” he promised. “I’ll have a stay of execution for you before the day’s over!” Then he wanted to know: “What’re you looking so down in the mouth about? Is this a time for—”

  “Go on, Westman,” I said, “don’t stand here chinning, get that thing out of my sight.”

  After awhile I went back to the phone again and called Tommy Vaillant. “Tom,” I said, “how quickly can you blow town?”

  “Why, in five minutes if I have to,” he said. “Why? What’s up?”

  “You better see that you do then. I just got a hot tip—they’re going to reopen the Pascal case.”

  “Where do I figure?” he asked. “I’m in the clear.”

  “Take my advice and don’t hang around arguing about it. Goodbye, Tom,” I sobbed. “Can you beat an extradition rap?”

  “With one hand tied behind my back. What’re you crying about?” he asked. “I—I sort of liked you, Tom,” I said, and I hung up.

  This morning when I opened my eyes Jackie was sitting up on one elbow looking at me in a worried sort of way. “Oh, my head,” I groaned. “Never again!”

  “Angel Face,” he said, “promise me you won’t take any more nightcaps.”

  “Why?”

  “You talk in your sleep, you say such funny things. You say it was you killed Bernice Pascal that time.”

  I gave him a starry look and smiled. Then he smiled back.

  “Angel Face,” he said.

  He always calls me that. Always says I haven’t a thing inside my head, but that the outside is a honey.

  (1935)

  The Body Upstairs

  I got home that night about 6:15. “Have a hard day?” the wife wanted to know as I pitched my hat at the chandeHer. “Supper’s ready.”

  “With you as soon as I poUsh off the body,” I said. I went in the bathroom, stripped and hopped into the tub.

  Halfway through, I stopped and looked around me. Either I was cockeyed or there was something the matter with the soap. It was Healthglo and it was red, like it edways is, but the color seemed to be running from it. Apparently it was dyeing the water a pede pinkish shade all around me. Very pretty but not my type of bath.

  All of a sudden something hit my shoulder and made me look up. I let out a 5dp. The whole ceiling over me was sopping wet. The stain kept spreading around the edges and a single drop at a time would come to a head right in the middle of it, very slowly, and then drop oflf. There must be a man-sized leak in the bathroom above, I thought, and what a leak—a young cloudburst to make it come cdl the way through like that! But that wasn’t what was peculiar about it. If it had been only a leak it would have been the plumber’s business and not mine. This was a pink leak! It was water mixed with something else. It was even changing the color of my bathwater little by little as it dripped into it. What that something else was I hated to think but I had a rough idea.

  I jumped into my pants and shirt, wet the way I was, and came tearing out of there. I nearly knocked my wife down getting to the door. “It’s the Frasers,” I said. “Something’s happened up there!” “Oh, that poor woman!” I heard her say in back of me.

  “You keep out of the bathroom for awhile,” I grunted.

  I chased up the stairs without waiting for the elevator. We were on the third, and they were on the fourth. There was a guy standing outside their door just taking his hand away fi^m the knob when I got up there. When he turned around I saw that it was Fraser himself

  “I can’t seem to get in,” he said. “I went oflF and forgot my key this morning.” He gave me a strained sickly sort of smile with it. He was a pale good-looking guy, with his hat over his left ear.

  I didn’t answer. Instead I turned and hollered down the stair-well: “Katie!” She wouldn’t have been a woman at all if she hadn’t been out at the foot of the stairs listening instead of staying inside the flat where she belonged. “Call up the super from our place and tell him to bring his passkey with him.”

  It didn’t seem to dawn on Preiser that something might be up. After all, I only knew him by sight. You’d think he’d wonder why it was up to me to worry about whether he got in or not. If he did, he didn’t let on. All he said was: “You don’t have to do that, my wife’ll be along any minute now.”

  “I doubt that, buddy, I doubt that,” I said, but I didn’t explain what I mesmt. That’d come soon enough.

  The elevator door banged open and the super came hustling out. I put out my hand for the key. “Give it here,” I said. “I’m doing it.”

  Fraser for the first time showed some slight surprise. “I don’t get you,” he said. “What do you want in my place?”

  I just said: “Save your breath, you’re going to need it,” and went in first. The first room, the living room, was perfectly O.K., neat as a pin, not an ashtray out of place. From there a short passageway led into the bedroom (same lay-out as our place) and in between the two was the bathroom. The bathroom door was closed tight and you couldn’t notice anything for a minute until you looked down at the floor. A pool of water had formed just outside the sill, still as glass. But when I opened the door—^boy! It was about a foot deep in there, and the tub was brimming over. But that wasn’t it, it was what weis in the tub that counted! It—or she—^was in the tub, completely submerged. But she wasn’t undressed for a bath; she was clothed. There was a flatiron in the tub with her. Her head had been pounded to pieces and you couldn’t have recognized her ainy more, even if you had known her. It was a blood-bath if there ever was one! No wonder it had come through to our place.

  It was Eraser’s wife all right. I heard a sound in back of me like air being slowly let out of a tire. Fraser had feiinted dead away in the super’s arms. The super himself looked pretty green in the face, and my own stomach did a half-turn. ‘Take him downstairs to my place,” I said.

  I locked up again to keep the other tenants out and followed them down. “Katie, do something for this man, will you?” I said, dialing Spring 7-3100 on our phone.

  “Murder?” she breathed.

  “And how. Pour me out two fingers will you, it’s the fiercest thing I’ve ever seen.” She wasn’t a detective’s wife for nothing; she didn’t ask any more questions aifter that.

  “This is Galbraith, chief Reporting from home. There’s been a murder right in my own building. A Mrs. Fraser, Apartment Four-C. Head mashed with a flatiron.”

  “Orright, get busy,” he snapped. “I’ll have the medical examiner with you right away.” Click!

  “You stay away from there, I told you. Keep that door closed.” This to Katie, whom I caught standing outside the bathroom staring hypnotized up at our stained ceiling. “We’ll have to have that replastered tomorrow.”

  I had my dinner by turning the little whiskey glass she’d handed me upside down over my mouth, then I ran back upstairs and let myself in.

  I took a look at the chamber of horrors through the door and sized her up. She was wearing a flowered kimona and house-slippers with pom-poms. I reached over, closed my eyes, turned the tap off and pulled up the plug to let the water out of the tub. Then I got the hell out of there.

  I
went around and took a look in the bedroom. They had one of these double photograph-folders set up on the dresser—one of him, one of her—and that gave me a good idea what her face had looked like while she still had one. Not pretty, but intelligent—lots of brains. They were all over the bathroom now, I thought to myself, for anyone to see. I threw open the bureau drawers and had a look-see at them. His junk was all crowded into one little top drawer, all the others were full of hers. Liked her own way, had she? Next the closet. He had one suit, she had nine dresses. A funny thing though, the air in the bedroom was clear and odorless but that in the closet smelt distinctly of stale cigarette smoke. I quickly closed the door, took a deep breath on the outside, opened it again and sniffed inside. It was fainter than the first time but still there.

  “Yeah, I’m in here, don’t bother me, go look in the bathroom,” I hollered out to the medical examiner and all the boys, who had just then arrived. A cop was hung outside the door to keep the reporters out, and everyone got down to work. When they began to get in my way I went down to my own place to give myself a little more elbow room, taking with me an insurance policy on Mrs. Eraser’s life I’d found tucked away in the bottom bureau drawer and two hairpins, one from the carpet in the bedroom, one from the mess on the bathroom floor. The policy was for ten grand and the first premium had been paid just one week before, so it was now in full swing. I phoned the salesman who’d made it out and had a talk with him.

  “Naw, he didn’t, she took it out herself,” he told me. “She said she was doing it because he wanted her to very badly, kept after her about it day and night.”

  “Oh-oh,” I grunted. “Got any idea who this Mrs. Drew is?”

  “Some woman friend of hers. She did that because she said she’d heard too many cases of people being killed for their insurance money, so she wasn’t taking any chances. Wouldn’t make her husband beneficiary, just in case.”

  But that didn’t go over at all with me. No woman that crowds all her husband’s belongings into one little top bureau drawer and appropriates all the rest for herself is afraid of her husband doing anything like that to her. She has too much to say over him. Or if she really had been afraid, why take out a policy at all, why not just lie low and steer clear of trouble altogether?

  I went in to ask Fraser a few questions, ready or not. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa in our living room, sticking his tongue in a glass of spirits of ammonia mixed with water and having St. Vitus’s dance from the waist up. Katie and the super, one on each side of him, were trying to buck him up. “Out,” I said to the two of them and jerked my thumb at the door.

  “Now no rough-house in here,” Katie warned me out of the comer of her mouth. “I just had this room vacuumed today.”

  “How much do you make?” I asked him when they’d both gone outside. He told me. “How much insurance y’carrying?”

  “Twenty-five hundred.”

  “And your wife?”

  “None,” he said.

  I watched him hard. He wasn’t lying. His eyes went up at me when he answered instead of dropping down.

  I took a turn around the room and lit a butt. “What was her maiden name?” I said.

  “Taylor.”

  “You got any married sisters?”

  “No, just a single one.”

  “She have any?”

  “No.”

  I went over to him and kicked his foot out of the way. “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Drew?”

  “Who?” he said.

  I said it over, about an inch away from his face.

  He screwed his eyes up innocently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any Mrs. Drew.”

  I had him figured for the nervous tjrpe. Slapping around wasn’t any good. It wasn’t in my line anyway. “All right, Mac, come on in the bathroom with me.” I hauled him in by the shoulder. He let out a moan when he saw the ceiling. I made him sit on the edge of the tub, then I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and held his head down. It was still coming through. It was mostly water but he couldn’t see that. He squirmed and tried to jerk back when the first drop landed on the back of his head. Sweat came out all over his face like rain.

  “Why’d you do it?” I said.

  “I didn’t, my God, I didn’t,” he choked. “Let me out of here—”

  “You’re going to sit here until you tell me why you did it and who Mrs. Drew is.”

  “I don’t know,” he moaned. “I never heard of her.” Another drop landed, on his pulse this time, and I thought he’d have convulsions.

  “Why’d you do it? Who’s Mrs. Drew?”

  He could hardly talk any more. “I didn’t. I don’t know her. How can I tell you if I don’t know her?” He kept waiting for the third drop that was coming. All of a sudden his head flopped and he fainted away again.

  It may have been cruel, but I don’t think so. It saved his life for him. It convinced me he hadn’t done it, and that he didn’t know who Mrs. Drew was. I got him over to a big chair and went and flagged Katie.

  “Maybe you can help me. What made you say ‘that poor woman!’ when I started up the first time? How is it you didn’t say ‘that poor man!’?”

  She looked indignant. “Why, he abused her! You were never home enough to hear what went on up there. They used to have terrible rows. She dropped in here only this morning and told me he’d threatened her life.”

  “I didn’t know you knew her that well.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “As a matter of fact today was the first time she’d ever been in here.”

  “I don’t get it,” I remarked. “Why should she come to you to spill a thing like that, if she hardly knew you at all?”

  “She mentioned she’d found out from one of the neighbors that I was married to a detective. Maybe she was looking for protection.”

  Or maybe, I said to myself, she was planting evidence against her husband. First with the insurance salesman, now with Katie. Somehow it smelled a little fishy to me. Women will gossip about other women’s husbands maybe, but never their own. This one had. She hadn’t just talked at random either. She’d shot off her mouth where it would do the most good; she’d created two star witnesses for the state in case anything happened.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I went and got the two hairpins I’d picked up upstairs and rinsed off the one I’d found on the bathroom floor. Then I went back to Katie. “You’re a woman,” I said. “How was she wearing her hair?”

  It took her four and a half minutes to tell me all about it, without once repeating herself. Then I showed her the two hairpins. “Which would go with that?”

  “Why, the amber one of course.” She nearly laughed in my face.

  “Only a man would ask a thing like that! How could a blonde like her use a black hairpin like this other one? It would have stood out a mile off.”

  “Here’s four bits,” I said. “Run along to the movies, you’ve earned it. And I don’t want you around when the boys come down to see Fraser.”

  I jiggled the two hairpins up and down in my hand. The black one was the one I’d found in the bedroom. Something told me that Mrs. Drew, when she showed up a few months from now to cash in on that ten grand, was going to turn out to be a dark-haired lady. But I wasn’t going to wait until then to make sure. I very much wanted to meet her now.

  I got my claws in the superintendent and hauled him in from the hallway, where Katie had lingered to give him instructions about kalsomining our ceiling. “Mrs. Fraser had a woman visitor sometime during the day today,” I told him. “Think hard.”

  “I don’t have to,” he said. “She came right up to me and asked me which entrance to take, it must have been her first visit.” The building is one of those inner garden things with four wings.

  “She had dark hair, didn’t she?”

  Then he goes and spoils my day. “Nah, she was as blond as they come.”

  I recovered after awhile. Just because he’d seen one caller
didn’t mean there hadn’t been others later on that he hadn’t seen. “You didn’t see her when she left, did you?” That was asking too much. But not of him, it turned out; he seemed to know everything that was going on. “I think I did at that,” he said. “I ain’t sure.”

  “Whaddye mean?” I said impatiently. “If you got a good look at her going in, how could you miss knowing her when she came out?”

  “I don’t know if it was her or not,” he said. “I saw someone come out of there that looked like her, was dressed just like her, but when she went in she was alone and when she came out there was a guy with her. I wasn’t close enough to her the second time to tell if it was the same one.”

  “That’s because y’mind ain’t trained,” I snapped. “Now forget all about her coming out and just concentrate on her going in. That ought to be easy because you said she stepped right up to you. All right, got it?” He nodded dumbly. “What color was she wearing?”

  “Black.”

  “Well, wasn’t there some ornament, some gadget or other on her that would strike your eye, catch your attention?” “I didn’t notice,” he said. “Close your eyes and try it.”

  He did, then opened them right up. “That’s right, there was,” he grinned happily. “I saw it just now with my eyes shut. She had a big bow on the side of her hat.” He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, it must have been her I saw coming out, the second one had it too. I spotted that same bow all the way across the court.”

  “See how it works?” I said. “Drop around sometime and we’ll be glad to give you a job—scrubbing the floor.” So she had a guy with her when she left. That explained who had done the smoking in the clothes closet up there. Clothes are too sacred to a woman, whether they’re her own or not, for her to risk getting sparks on them. It would take a man not to give a damn where he lit up.

  It was still all balled up to me. The best I could do was this: the lady-visitor had arrived first, openly, and been let in by Mrs. Fraser. Then when Mrs. F. wasn’t looking she had slipped a male accomplice into the flat and he’d hidden in the closet and waited for a favorable opportunity to jump out and give her the works. I scratched the part out of my hair. That was lousy, it stank. First, because the woman had gone right up to the super of her own free will and let him take a good look at her when it would have been easy enough to avoid that. Second, because she was a blonde, and the hairpin I’d picked up was a black one. Third, because it was Mrs. Fraser herself and not anyone else who had gone around planting suspicion against her husband. You might almost say that she had lent a hand in her own murder.