They say you should be able to see the two sides to any story. Sitting here like that, waiting, with the walls pressing me in at the elbows, I saw as much of Drew’s side of it as I was ever likely to. No wonder ten grand had seemed a lot of money, no wonder murder hadn’t stopped him, if it meant getting out of a hole like this. Not that
I felt sorry for him, I just understood a little better than before. But there was one good angle to it. The ten grand wouldn’t be his for a long time yet, not for months. Meanwhile he needed what was in that envelope the janitor had, needed the little that was coming to him from “Sylvia’s,” needed it bad. He’d be around for it. I couldn’t lose.
Once in awhile I’d hear a step on the stairs, the old wooden stairs that seemed to go right up over my room, when somebody in the house came up or went down them. Once some woman hollered down from the top floor for her kid to come up. That was all. Silence the rest of the time. The minutes went like hours and the hours like weeks. I didn’t even smoke; there wasn’t room enough for two kinds of air in the place. I just sat, until I had a headache.
It came a little before eight, sooner than I’d expected. He must have needed it bad to come that quickly, or maybe he thought it was safer to get it over with right away than to wait a few days. He’d probably read in the papers by now that Fraser was taking the rap, anyway. And once he had this letter in his pocket and had walked around the comer, try to locate him again, just try.
Ding-ding-ding peeped the bell battery, and the air in the room got all churned up. I hauled the door out of the way and loped down the dim hallway. The janitor was standing just inside the street door waving his arm to me like a windmill. “He just went away,” he said. “There he goes, see him?” His cheap khaki waterproof was a pushover to tail.
“Get back!” I snarled and gave him a shove. “He’s liable to turn around.” I waited a second to get set, then I mooched out of the house, took a squint at the sky, turned my coat-collar up and started down the street in the same direction. He did look back from the comer just before he turned, but I’d finished crossing to the opposite side and was out of his line of vision.
I gave him a lot of rope for the first two blocks, then I saw a subway entrance heading toward us and I closed up on him in a hurry. He went into it like I’d been afraid he would. It’s about the best way of shaking anyone off there is, but he had to change a dime or something, and when I got down the steps myself he’d only just gone through the turnstile. There was a train already in, with its doors wide open and jammed to the roof. He took it on the run along with a lot of others and wedged himself in on the nearest platform just as the doors started to slip closed. There was just room enough left to get my fingernails in by the time I got there, but that was all the leverage I needed. They were the pneumatic kind. Back they went and I was standing on his feet and we were breathing into each other’s faces. “Whew!” I thought to myself, and kept my eyes fixed on the back of a newspaper the fat man next to him was reading.
He squirmed and yanked at 110th and tugged himself free. When I got up to the street myself he was just going into an A.&P. store. I took a look in the door as I went past. He was standing at the counter waiting his turn. Evidently they hadn’t even had the price of groceries until he called for that money that was coming to him. I walked all the way to the next corner, then doubled back on the other side of the street and finally parked at a bus stop and stood there waiting. But the right bus for me never seemed to come along.
He was in there over ten minutes, and then when he came out his arms were still empty anyway. Meaning he’d ordered so much that he couldn’t carry it himself. So they were going to stock up for the next few weeks and lie low, were they? I just barely kept him in sight after this, only close enough to tell which building he’d hit, as I knew there would be a last look back before he ducked. He finally got where he was going, gave a couple of cagy peeks, one over each shoulder, and then it was over. He was in—in Dutch.
I sized it up from where I was, tying my shoelace on somebody’s railing. It was a President McKinley-model flat on the south side of 109th, crummy as they come, without even a service entrance. That meant the groceries would have to be delivered at the front door when they came around, which was a chance for a lot more than groceries to crash in. No lights showed up in any front windows after he’d gone in, so I figured they had a flat in the rear. I eased myself into the vestibule. Half of the mailboxes had no names in them, so they were no help. I hadn’t expected his to have any, but if the rest of them had I could have used a process of elimination. It was so third-class the street door didn’t even have a catch on it, you just opened it and walked in.
I worked my way up the stairs floor by floor, listening carefully at the rear doors on each landing. There was a radio going behind one of them, but nobody seemed to be in any of the others. If I had them cornered they were lying mighty low. I hated to think I might have slipped up in some way. I started soft-shoeing my way down again, and just below the second floor met the groceries coming up in a big box about twice the size of the lad struggling with it. “Where they going?” I said.
“Fourth floor, rear.”
I had him put them down, then I thumbed him downstairs. “I’ll see that they get them.” He was too exhausted to argue. I unlimbered my gun, gave the door a couple of taps, and flattened myself back to one side of it.
Not a sound, not even a footfall, for a couple of minutes. Then all of a sudden a voice spoke from the other side of the door, only a few inches away from me. “Who’s out there?”
I thinned my voice to make it sound like a kid’s. “A.&P., boss.”
A chain clanked and fell loose. The lock, I noticed, was shiny and new, must have just been put on. I reached out with my heel and kicked a can of tomatoes to give him confidence. The door cracked and before it was an inch wide I had the gun pushing in his belt buckle. “Up,” I snapped. He lifted them all right but couldn’t keep them from shaking. He didn’t have anything on him though, so the precautions must have been just to give them time to make a get-away, and not because he’d intended fighting it out. There was no hall and the door opened right into the living room. I cuffed him to me and started to push in.
“What’s all this about?” he tried to stall, and I heard a window go up.
“Hold it!” I yelled, and covered her from across his shoulder just as she raised one leg to go over. “Come on in again, baby.”
There was my black-haired lady, a little pale around the gills, eyes nearly popping out of her head. There was something funny about her which I couldn’t dope out at first. I took a second look and nearly keeled over. If I had, though, they wouldn’t have hung around waiting for me to revive, so I gave a long whistle instead and let it go at that. I gave her a shove with my knee to show her which direction to take. “Get started, you head the daisy-chain going downstairs.”
The chief was damn near bowled over when I brought them in to him. “So your Mrs. Drew wasn’t a mj^h after all and you finally found her,” he opened.
I knocked the black wig off her head with the back of my hand. “Mrs. Drew your eye. If you’re holding Fraser for killing his wife better turn him loose. This is her right here.” Her blond hair, clipped off short, stood up funny all over her head.
One of the boys who had used Eraser’s armpits as ashtrays spoke up. “Then what was that we saw in the bathtub—”
“That was Eraser’s sister, poor kid,” I said. “She left Pittsfield that day and hasn’t been seen since. Fraser didn’t know she was coming but this pair did—maybe they got her to come down some way—but she must have walked in unannounced and spoiled their big love scene. Drew hid in the closet until time to come out and do his stuff. Mrs. Fraser probably led up to it with a quarrel. She and the sister didn’t hate each other. Anyway, they had the frame all planned to pass off her body as his wife’s and let him fry for it. They dressed her in Mrs. F.‘s kimona, dumped her in the tub and then proceeded to mut
ilate her face with the iron until even her supposed husband couldn’t recognize her any more. Then the real Mrs. Fraser put on the dead girl’s clothes and this black wig and beat it with her side-kick. As soon as Fraser had hit the ceiling at Sing Sing she would have married Drew, and then there would have been a Mrs. Drew all right to collect that ten-grand premium on her own life.”
I shoved all the evidence I had across the desk at him and went home.
“Supper’s ready,” the wife said. “Should I wait until you’ve had your bath?”
“Just open the windows,” I said. “You don’t catch me in that tub again until Nineteen Forty.”
(1935)
Kiss of the Cobra
Mary’s old man, after six years of office-managing for a tire company in India, comes heading back with a brand-new wife. He breaks it to us in a telegram first and then makes a bee-line for the place we’ve taken up in the hills beyond San Bernardino. It seems he wants to show her to us.
My boss has been whiter than snow to me. I’m on leave of absence with pay, and that’s how we happen to be there.
When I had dragged myself in, a few weeks before, to report for duty after a tussle with the flu, I was down to 130, stripped, and saw spots in front of my eyes. He took one look at me and started swearing. “Get out of here!” he hollered. “Go ‘way back someplace and sit down for six weeks. I’ll see that you get your checks. It gives me the shivers to look at you!” When I tried to thank him he reached for his inkwell, maybe just to sign some report, but I didn’t wait to find out.
So we hauled two centuries out of the bank, took the kid brother with us, and wound up in this dead-end up in the San Benny mountains. It hasn’t even electric lights, but it isn’t so bad at that. You can’t quite hear the caterpillars drop. So there we are now, the three of us, Mary and me and the kid brother, waiting for her old man to show up.
He drives up around eight in the evening, smack off the boat, in a car he’s hired down in L. A. He’s brought her with him. She gets out and comes up to the house on his arm, while the driver starts unloading half of Asia behind them. He comes in grinning all over and shakes hands with the three of us. “This is Veda,” he says.
“Where’d she ever get that name?” I think to myself.
She’s a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic—you can’t take your eyes off her. She’s dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn’t walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece—undulates is the word.
She’s smoking a ten-inch Russian cigarette, and when I touch her hand the sensation I get is of something cold wriggling in my grasp— like an eel. I can’t help it, the skin on the back of my own hand crawls a little. I try to tell myself that anyone’s handshake would feel like that after a drive in the open on a raw, damp night like this. But I can tell Mary doesn’t like her either. She acts a little afraid of her without knowing why, and I have never known Mary to be afraid of anything in her life before. Mary keeps blinking her eyes rapidly, but she welcomes her just the same and takes her upstairs to show her her room. A peculiar odor of musk stays behind in the room after she’s gone.
I go out to the pantry and I find the kid brother helping himself to a stiff nip. “The rain is bringing things up out of the ground,” he mutters.
Kids don’t finish growing until they’re twenty-five, so I kick him in the shins, take it away from him, and kill it myself, so as not to cheat him out of an extra half inch or so. “What’s your trouble?” I snap.
“She’s Eurasian,” he scowls, staring down at the floor. “Something mixed like that.” He’s been to college and I haven’t, so he has me there. “Tough on sis,” he says. “Damn it, I would have preferred some little digger with a pickax and baby-blue eyes. There’s something musty, something creepy about her. Brrh!”
Me too, but I won’t give in to him. “It’s the house, it’s been shut up all summer.” And we look at each other and we know I’m lying.
All kinds of trunks, boxes, crates come in and go up to her room, the driver is paid off and takes the car back to L. A., and the five of us are left alone now in the house.
When she comes down to supper I don’t like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. She’s put on a shiny dress, all fish-scales, like this was still India or the boat. On her head she’s put a sort of beaded cap that fits close—like a hood. A mottled green-and-black thing that gleams dully in the candlelight. Not a hair shows below it, you can’t tell whether she’s a woman or what the devil she is. Right in front, above her forehead, there’s a sort of question-mark worked into it, in darker beads. You can’t be sure what it is, but it’s shaped like a question-mark.
Then, when we all sit down and I happen to notice how she’s sitting, all the short hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She’s sort of coiled around in her chair, like there were yards and yards of her. One arm is looped sinuously around the back of the chair, like she was hanging from it, and when I pretend to drop my napkin and look under the table, I see both her feet twined around a single chair-leg instead of being flat on the floor. But I tell myself, “What the hell, they probably sit different in India than we do,” and let it go at that.
Then, when Mary slaps around the soup-plates I get another jar. We’re none of us very refined and we all bend our heads low over the soup, so as not to miss any of it. But when I happen to look up and take a gander at her, her head is down lower than anyone else’s with that damn flat hood on it, and I get a sudden horrible impression, for a minute, of a long black-and-green snaks sipping water down by the edge of a river or pool. I shake my head to clear it and keep from jumping back, and tell myself that that nip I had in the pantry just before dinner was no good. Wait’ll I get hold of that guy in San Benny for selling me stuff like that!
O.K. Supper’s over and Mary tickles the dishes, and then we light a log fire in the fireplace and we sit around. At ten Mary goes up to bed; she can’t stand that damn Indian perfume or whatever it is. Vin, that’s the kid brother, and I stick around a little longer sipping port and listening to the old man jaw about India, and I keep watching Veda.
She’s facing the fire, still in that coiled-up position. She’s sort of torpid, she hasn’t moved for hours, but her eyes glitter like shoe-buttons in the light of the flames. There’s something so reptilian about her that I keep fighting back an impulse to grab up a long stick, a fire-iron, anything at all, and batter and whack at her sitting over there.
It scares me and I sweat down the back—God, I must be going screwy! It’s my father-in-law’s wife, it’s a woman, and me thinking things like that! But you can’t see the lines of her body at all, they’re lost in a thick, double coil, the top one formed by her hip, the lower one by her calf, and then that flat, hooded head of hers rising in the middle of it and brooding into the fire with its basilisk eyes.
After a long time, she moves, but it only adds to the horrid impression that I can’t seem to get rid of. I’m watching her very closely and she evidently doesn’t know it. But what I see is this: she sort of arches her neck, which is long and thin anyway, so that her head comes up a little higher. She holds it for a minute, reared like that, and then she lets it sink back again between her shoulder-blades. So help me God if it isn’t like a snake peering out from some tall grass to see what’s what!
She repeats it again a little while later, and then a third time. Vin and the old man don’t see it at all, and it’s barely noticeable anyway. Just like a person easing a stiff neck by stretching it. Only she does it in a sort of rounded way, almost a spiral way. But maybe it’s just a nervous habit, I try to tell myself, and what’s the matter with me anyway? If this keeps up, I’m a son of a so-and-so if I don’t go in and see a doctor tomorrow.
I look at the wall-clock and it’s five to eleven, late for the mountains, so I give Vin the eye to clear, to give the newlyweds a break alone together by the fire. Meanwhile a big orange moon
has come up late and everything is as still as death for miles around, not even a mountain owl’s hoot, as if the whole set-up was just waiting for something to happen.
The kid and I get up and say good-night, and, fire or no fire, her hand isn’t any warmer than before, so I let go of it in a hurry. Vin goes right up but I take a minute off to lock up the windows and the door. Then, as I’m climbing, I glance around at them. They’ve moved closer together and the dying fire throws their shadows on the wall behind them. The old man’s head looks just like what it should, but hers is flat, spade-shaped, you almost expect to see a forked tongue come darting in and out. She’s moving a little and I see what she’s doing, she’s rouging her lips. I give a deep sigh of relief and it takes such a load off my mind to find out she’s just a regular woman after all, that I stop there for a minute and forget to go on.
Then she takes something out of the little bag she has with her and offers it to him. It’s one of those long reefers she seems partial to. She also takes one herself. “Cigarette,” she murmurs silkily, “before we go up?” She says it in such a soft voice it almost sounds like a hiss.
I know I have no business watching, so I soft-shoe it the rest of the way up and go about my business. Only five minutes go by, less than that even, and I hear a rustling and a swishing in the upstairs hall and that’s her going to her room—by herself. You don’t hear any footsteps when she walks, just a soft sound that scaly dress of hers makes when it drags along the floor.
Her door closes and goodnight to her, I say to myself; and I think I wouldn’t want to be in Mary’s father’s shoes for all the rice in China. Then, as I come out of the bathroom with my toothbrush in my hand, I hear the old man’s step starting up the stairs from the floor below and I wait there out in the hall to have a last word with him.
He comes up slow, he’s breathing kind of hard, sounds like sandpaper rubbing on concrete, and then when he gets halfway to where the landing is, he hesitates. Then he comes on a step or two more, stops again, and then there’s a soft plop like something heavy falling. Right after that the woodwork starts to creak and snap a lot, as if somebody was wrestling on it. I don’t wait to listen to any more, I throw my toothbrush away and I chase to the end of the hall. When I look down, I gasp in surprise.
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 13