Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  I went up to 4-C again, giving myself a scalp treatment on the way. The cop was still outside the door. “Never mind trying to hide your cigarette behind you,” I said, “you’re liable to burn yourself where it won’t do you any good.” No more reporters, they had a deadline, and the medical examiner had gone too. She was still in there, on the living-room floor now, waiting to go out. “Oh, by the way,” I mentioned, “I’m holding the husband down in my place, in case you guys want to take a look at him.” They almost fell over each other in their hurry to get out and at him. “He didn’t do it,” I called after them, but I knew better than to expect them to listen to me.

  I followed them out and right away another door down the hall opened an inch or two. It was just Mrs. Katz of 4-E trying to get a free look at the body when it was carried out. I beckoned to her and she came the rest of the way out, pounds and pounds of her. I liked Mrs. K. at sight. I bet she cooked a mean bowl of noodles. “Maybe you can tell me something I’d like to know.”

  She finished swallowing the marshmallow she was chewing on. “Sure, sure, maybe I’ll get my name in the papers, huh? Poppa, come here.”

  “No, never mind Poppa. Did you see anyone go in there yesterday to call on her, in a black dress?”

  “No,” she said, “but somebody in a black dress was coming out. I met them down by the elevator when I was coming home from the grocer, a man and a woman together. They didn’t live in the building so maybe they was visiting.”

  “Big bow on her hat?”

  She nodded excitedly. “Sure, sure.”

  “That’s them. Blond, wasn’t she?”

  “Get out! Dark—darker as I am even.”

  I wheeled her around on her base and pushed her back in again. I had it now! The super met her coming in and he said she was blond. Mrs. Katz passed her going out and said she was dark. Well, they were both right. She’d come in blond and she’d gone out brunette.

  I ran all the way downstairs to the basement and dragged the super away from his radio. “What time do you start the fire in the incinerator?”

  “Not until after midnight,” he said. “Let it bum out between then and morning.”

  “Then all today’s rubbish is still intact?”

  “Sure. I never touch it until the tenants are all asleep.”

  “Show me where it is, I’ve got to get at it.” We took a couple of torches, a pair of rubber gloves, and an iron poker and went down into the sub-basement. We should have taken gas masks too. He threw open the doors of the big oven-like thing and I ducked my coat and started to crawl in head-first.

  “You can’t go in there!” he cried aghast. “They’re still using the chutes at this hour, you’ll get garbage all over you.”

  “How the hell else am I going to get at it?” I yelled back over my shoulder. “Which of these openings is fed by the C-apartments?”

  “The furthest one over.”

  “It would be! You go up and give orders no one in the building is to empty any more garbage until I can get out of here.”

  I don’t ever want a job like that again. Pawing around among the remains of people’s suppers is the last word in nastiness. Slippery potato peels got in my shoes and fishbones pricked my fingers. Holding my breath didn’t help much. I was in there over half an hour. When I was through I came out backwards an inch at a time and took a good sneeze, but what I came out with was worth it. I had two fistfuls of human hair, blond hair cut off short at the scalp. Cut off in a hurry, because one of the hairpins that had dressed it was still tangled in it. It hadn’t come from the dead woman’s head; there was no blood on it. The hairpin was amber, mate to the one I’d found upstairs. I also had the crumpled lid of a cardboard box that said Sylvia, Hairdresser on it. It looked like a hatbox but it wasn’t, hairdressers don’t sell hats. I didn’t really need it, I had a general idea of what was what now, but as the saying goes, every little bit added to what you’ve got makes a little bit more.

  Upstairs I hung my duds out on the fire-escape to air and put on clean ones. Then I beat it over to headquarters to talk some more to Fraser. I found him in the back room where a couple of the boys had been holding hands with him since he’d been brought in. I got the cold shoulder all around, to put it mildly. “Well, well,” said one of them, “look who’s here. Nice of you to drop in. Care to sign your name in the guest-book?”

  “I remember now,” said the other. “Isn’t Galbraith the name? Weren’t you assigned to this case just tonight?”

  “He wouldn’t know. It didn’t happen close enough to get him steamed up,” said the first one. “The corpse only just about landed in his—”

  I stuck my hands deep in my pockets and grabbed hold of the lining. “What’s that paper you’ve got in your hand?” I cut in.

  “Why, this is just the confession of Fraser here that he killed his wife, which he is now about to sign. Aren’t you, Fraser?”

  Fraser nodded like a jack-in-the-box and his eyes seemed to roll around all over his head. “Anything, anything,” he gasped. They read it back to him and he almost tore it away from them, he was so anxious to sign and get it over with. I just stood by and took it all in. It didn’t amount to a hell of a whole lot. In fact it stacked up to exactly nothing. “Phooey!” I said. “You’ve got him punch-drunk, that’s all. Who the hell couldn’t get anything out of that nerve-wreck?”

  His hand wobbled so that he could hardly put his name to it. They had to steady him by the elbow. “Now will you lemme alone, now will you lemme alone?” he kept murmuring over and over.

  “Get wise,” I said as I followed them outside. “Why don’t you save yourselves a lot of razzing and tear that thing up before you show it to anybody?”

  “Get that!” one of them laughed.

  “Green with envy,” added the other.

  “Look,” I said patiently, “let me show you. He didn’t have the key, couldn’t get in to do it even if he wanted to.”

  “That’s what he tried to hand us, too.”

  “I know it’s the truth because I found his key myself, found it on the living-room floor right in my own flat. The super had dumped him on the sofa, see, with his feet higher than his head.”

  Did they laugh! They made more noise than a shooting-gallery.

  “Know where it had been all the time? In the cuff of his trouser. Dropped in when he was dressing this morning and stayed there all day long. It’s a natural, one of those crazy little things that do happen ever once in a while. That’s why I believe him. If it had disappeared altogether, I wouldn’t have. But who’d think of planting a key in his own trouser-cuff? If that ain’t enough for you dimwits, I checked up on where he worked, called his employer at his home, found out what time he left the office. He’d only just gotten to his door when I came up the stairs and found him standing outside of it.”

  But I could have saved my breath, it was like talking to the walls. They had their suspect in the bag and were going to see that he stayed there. They shook their heads pityingly at me and went on out to break the glad news to the chief. I went in to Fraser again and sent the cop out of the room. His hair was all down over his face and he was just staring out under it without seeing anything. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, but I didn’t let him know it.

  “What’d you do that for?” I said quietly.

  He knew I meant signing that cheesy confession. “It’s no fun when they jab cigarette butts up under your armpits.”

  “Can that.” I gave him a hard look. “I don’t want to hear about your troubles. If there’s anything yellower than killing your wife, it’s saying you did it when you didn’t. Now try to snap out of it and act like a man even if you’re not. I want to ask you something.” I called the cop and told him to bring him in a cup of coffee. While he was slobbering it all over the front of his shirt and sniffing into it I said: “You told me you’ve got an unmarried sister. She blond?”

  “Yeah,” he sobbed, “like me.”

  “Where can I g
et hold of her?”

  “She don’t live here, she’s up in Pittsfield, Mass., with my folks.”

  “How’d she get along with your wife?”

  “Not so hot,” he admitted.

  I let him alone after that. “Put him back in mothballs,” I told the cop.

  In the chief’s office the two half-baked rookies were all but doing a war-dance around their embalmed confession, while the chief read it over through his glasses. Embalmed is right, it smelled out loud.

  “You showed up smart on that last case,” the chief said to me sourly.

  “Why, it hasn’t broken yet, I’m still with it,” I said quietly. “That guy in there, Fraser, didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Who did?”

  “A Mrs. Drew,” I said. “I’ll show her to you as soon as I can. G’night.”

  I ran up a big bill by calling Pittsfield, Mass., long-distance, but it didn’t take me long to find out all I wanted to know about Eraser’s sister. Which was simply that she wasn’t there. The last anyone had seen of her had been the night before, waiting around the depot for a train. I wondered if even a girl from Pittsfield would be dumb enough to think she was disguising herself by changing her hair from blond to dark—still, you never can tell. Every once in awhile one of those 1880 twists crops up in a 1935 case. Apart from that, I found out there wasn’t anyone named Drew in the whole of Pittsfield.

  Even so, I had a pretty good set-up after just twenty-four hours’ work. I had the two angles of the triangle now—the two women— Eraser’s wife and sister. All I needed was a third angle, the man in the case. And that wasn’t Eraser, he was just the fall guy in this.

  Who the guy was, that had smoked in the clothes-closet and then stepped out to turn Mrs. Eraser’s head into caviar, wasn’t going to be any cinch. Starting from scratch I had this much on him: both the super and Mrs. Katz had lamped him on his way out, which wasn’t much but it was better than nothing at all. In addition there was one other little thing I didn’t need to be told by anybody. I was as sure as though I had been present at his christening that his name was going to turn out to be Drew, the same as the lady who was down on the insurance policy as beneficiary. But that was only a detail. He could call himself Smith for all I cared just as long as I got hold of him. As far as Eraser’s sister was concerned she could keep. The point being that wherever Drew was, Mrs. Drew wouldn’t be very far away. And if the Eraser girl happened to be Mrs. Drew, with or without benefit of clergy, that was her tough luck.

  The first thing I did was to get hold of the super and Mrs. Katz, one at a time, and quiz them to get a rough idea of what he had looked like. It took hours and used up thousands of words, because neither of them were exactly Einsteins, but I got a couple of interesting facts out of them. The super, who had been all the way across the court from him, could only contribute that on his way out he had taken the woman who was with him by the arm to help her manage the two very low, harmless steps that led down to the sidewalk level. Mrs. Katz, who had been waiting to go in the elevator as they came out, enlarged on this trait of gallantry he seemed to possess.

  “Well, one thing, he was no loafer,” she said approvingly. “I had my arms full with bundles, so what does he do, he turns and holds the elevator door open for me, I should go in.”

  Darned polite, I said to myself, for a guy who had just committed a murder. Politeness must have been an awfully strong habit with him, a hangover from whatever line of business he was in. Mrs. Katz was certainly no spring chicken, and I’ve seen better lookers. Who, I asked myself, is trained to be polite to women of all ages, no matter what they look like? Who has to be, in order to earn a living? A gigolo. A headwaiter. A floorwalker in a department store. An automobile salesman. A hairdresser—

  Sure. I might have known that from the beginning. Hair seemed to have a lot to do with this. This woman had gone in there blond and come out brunette. I’d found a lot of blond hair cut off in a hurry in the incinerator, without any blood on it. This unknown guy had been up there at the time, although nobody saw him go in. And he’s so used to handing out the oil to his customers that even when he comes out with that butchery on his conscience, he instinctively holds the door open for one woman, elaborately helps the other down a two-inch step. What you might call a reflex action. And to cinch the whole thing, there was that crumpled lid of a cardboard box that had been thrown down the garbage chute; the one that said Sylvia, Hairdresser on it.

  That gave me a pretty good idea of how he had employed his talents up there in the flat, apart from mangling Mrs. Fraser. But all the same it took my breath away, left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. The guy must be a monster. Was it possible for a human being to batter one woman to death and then right on top of that, in the very next room, calmly sit down and go to work giving his accomplice a quick treatment to change the color of her hair?

  He must have said: “Anyone see you come in?” She must have said: “I had to ask the superintendent where it was.” He must have cursed her out for being ninety-nine kinds of a fool, then said: “Well, I took a chance on someone spotting you. I brought something that’ll fix it so they won’t know you as you go out.”

  Well, I could fix it so nobody’d know either one of them this time next year, and I wasn’t wasting any more time about it either. I looked up Sylvia’s in the directory, and luckily there were only three of them to buck. If it had been Frances or Renee I would have had half a column to wade through. Nothing doing with the first two; I got to the third a little before five in the afternoon.

  It was a whale of a place. Twenty-two booths going full-blast and a lot of steam and perfume and cigarette smoke all mixed up. It gave me the creeping willies to be in there, especially after somebody’s face with black mud all over it nearly scared me out often years’ growth. I stayed close to the door and asked to see the proprietor. It turned out Sylvia was just a trade-name and the proprietor was a man after all. He came out rubbing his hands; maybe he was just drying them off.

  “You got anybody named Drew working for you?” I said.

  “No,” he said, “we had an expert named de la Rue here until the day before yesterday, but he isn’t with us any more.”

  That interested me right away. “Come again, what’d you say the name was?”

  He made a mouth like that guy in the hair-tonic ads. “Gaston de la Rue,” he gargled.

  I flashed my identification at him and he nearly jumped out of his skin and forgot about being French. “Break down,” I said, “I’m not one of your customers. Nobody on two legs ever had a name like that. Was it Drew or wasn’t it?”

  “Sh, not so loud,” he said, “very bad for business. They like ‘em French. This is just between us. Please keep it to yourself Well yes, in private life I think he was called Gus Drew or something like that. But what an artist, he could have put a permanent-wave in a porcupine—”

  “Let me see your appointment book for the past few weeks.” He took me back in his office and showed it to me. Mrs. Fraser’s name was down there three times in one month, and right next to it each time were “de la Rue’s” initials. “Why’d she always get him?” I wanted to know.

  He shrugged. “She always asked for him. Some of them, they like to flirt a little.”

  “Flirt with death,” I growled to myself. “Is he due back here for an5rthing?” I asked him.

  “He’s got a week’s pay coming to him, but when he called up and I asked him about it he said he wasn’t coming in for it. He told me to mail it to where he lives.”

  “And did you? When?”

  “Last night at closing time.”

  It was just about being delivered. “Quick,” I said. “Got his last

  address on record? Fork it over.” He gave it to me, then made a crack that nearly killed me. “Why

  ‘last,’ did he move?”

  “Oh no, he’ll probably wave to me from the window.”

  He followed me back to the front o
f the place again, sort of worried.

  “What’s he done?” he said. “What do they want him for?”

  “The chief would like to have his mustache curled,” I answered and

  walked out.

  I took a taxi and rode right up to the door of the address Mr. “Sylvia” had given me. I didn’t expect him to be there any more and he wasn’t. “Just moved out yesterday,” the janitor said. “Didn’t say where. Nice quiet fellow, too.”

  “Where’s that letter you’re holding for him?” I said. “Did it come yet?”

  “Just now. He said he’d be back for it.” His mouth opened. “How’d you know?”

  “This is who I am,” I said. “Now get this. I can’t be hanging around the hallway. He mayn’t show up for days. I’ll take one of your rooms. You give him his letter when he asks for it, but watch yourself, keep a straight face on you. Then ring my bell three times, like this, see? Don’t let him see you do it, but don’t wait too long either—do it as soon as he turns his back on you. Now have you got that straight? God help you if you muff it.”

  “Golly, ain’t this exciting!” he said. He showed me a sliver of a hall room at the back of the ground floor, with exactly three things in it—a bed, a light-bulb, and a window. I paid him a dollar apiece for them and after that I lived there. I tested the doorbell battery by staying where I was and having the janitor ring it for me from the vestibule. It was no cathedral chime but at least you could hear it, which was all that interested me.