Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  A money motive will stack up stronger in a criminal court of justice than any other you can dig up. It’s liable to make an innocent person guilty in the minds of any twelve people in a jury box, I don’t care who they are. If you can’t produce one you may as well turn your defendant loose unless you can show them newsreel films of the crime in the act of being committed!

  Veda was a pushover for a deaf, dumb and blind defense attorney now, if I dared haul her up. As a matter of fact, now that the original will was the only one left in circulation, a much stronger motive could be pinned on Mary and the kid than on her, and there was nothing to prevent the defense boomeranging and trying to show that it was to their interest to get the old guy out of the way before he changed his will and dished them out of it in favor of this stranger from the East. There wouldn’t be much danger of its going any further than that, but at least it would free her—and then woe betide California, Oregon, Washington, while she roamed the Pacific Coast jacking up the death rate!

  “So now,” the kid says bitterly, “why don’t you get smart to yourself, y’ would-be gumshoer, and lay off her? Strain a muscle and act chivalrous even if it ain’t in you!”

  I close my eyes to shut out what I see coming to him. Is he sold on her! Has she got what it takes to catch ‘em young and brand ‘em! He’s doomed if I don’t break this thing up in a hurry. It may be puppy love to him, but what has he got that she wants? She don’t want anything from him but his life! She would probably have picked on me instead, only she knows I’m on to her, can tell I don’t trust her. The resistance ratio would be too high. Maybe guys in their prime aren’t her meat; she only works on the old and the young.

  What the hell can I do? I can’t drive him out of the house at the point of my gun and make him stay away from her. He’d probably throw a rock at me the minute my back was turned and come right in again the back way. “All right. Sir Galahad,” I tell him sadly, “have it your way.”

  “Aw, go to hell!” he says, and bangs out of the house to kick around among the trees outside and blow off steam. I do too. I smash last night’s empty whiskey bottle across the room, then I just sit down and wait. The old man never died a natural death, and my hands are tied. It hurts where I ought to have pleasure!

  The moon chokes down out of sight, it gets light, and at six there’s a lot of commotion and backfiring outside and the San Benny medical expert is back with his report. No cop with him this time, I notice, which doesn’t look encouraging. I can hardly wait for him to get in the house. I almost haul him in by the collar. The kid looks up scornfully, I notice, then goes ahead scuffling pebbles with the point of his shoe out there.

  “All right, what’s the ticket? Hurry up!” I fire at the examiner.

  “I been up all night,” he says. “I been working like a machine. I wouldn’t do this for my own mother.” He has a baffled air about him. “I’m out of my depth,” he admits.

  “I ain’t interested in your swimming ability, I wanna know about that stiff and those cigarettes. What’d you find?”

  “Well, we’ll tackle the butts first. They’re out. I had the tobacco and the paper analyzed, triple-ply. No narcotic, not dipped or impregnated in any poisonous solution—absolutely nothing wrong anywhere.”

  “Wa-a-ait a minute, wa-a-ait a minute now!” I haul up short. “I got eyes. What was that brownish stain on the mouthpiece of the one he’d smoked? Don’t try to hand me it was nicotine discoloring the paper, either, because it didn’t run all the way around the tip. It was just in one place and one only!”

  “That,” he explains, “was a dot of dried blood. He’d torn his lip there in smoking the cigarette. Too dry. Often happens.”

  “O.K.,” I say disappointedly, “let’s get on with it. What are you putting down in your report as the direct cause?”

  “Paralysis of the nerve centers.” He takes a turn or two around the room. “But there was no rhyme or reason for it. It wasn’t a stroke, it wasn’t apoplexy, it wasn’t the bubonic plague—”

  Through the window just then, I see the kid look up at the upper part of the house, as though a pebble or something fell near him and attracted his attention. But I’m too interested in what we’re talking about to give him much thought right then. He sort of smiles in a goofy way.

  I turn back to the examiner. “Then you can’t tell me anything? You’re a big help!”

  “I can’t give you any more facts than those. And since it’s my business to give you facts and not theories, I’ll shut up.”

  “The pig’s aunt you will!” I blaze. “You’ll give me whatever you’ve got whether you can back it up or not.”

  “Well, this is off the record then. I’d be laughed at from here to Frisco and back. But the only close parallel to the sjmiptoms of that corpse, the only similarity to the condition of the blood stream and to the bodily rigidity and distortion I’ve ever found, was in bodies I used to see every once in awhile along the sides of the roads, years ago, when I was a young medical student out in India, Java, and the Malay States.”

  “Write a book about it!” I think impatiently. “And what stopped ‘em?” I hurry him up. It’s like pulling teeth to get anything out of this guy.

  “The bite of a cobra,” he says in a low voice.

  The front door inches open and the kid slides back in the house and tracks up the stairs sort of noiseless and self-effacing like he didn’t want to attract attention. He’s been up all night, and I figure he’s going to bed and don’t even turn my head and look around at him. Besides, I’ve finally got something out of this guy, and it chimes in with what’s been in the back of my mind ever since she first showed up here, and I’m too excited right then to think of anything else.

  “Then what’s holding you up?” I holler out excitedly. “Put it down in your report, that’s all I need! If you ain’t sure of the species, just say ‘poisonous snakebite.’ What are you waiting for? You want me to catch the thing and stuff it for you before you’ll go ahead? I’ll produce it for you all right!”

  I remember those “chickens” of hers in that crate with the wire netting—upstairs in her room at this very minute. Chickens, me eye! And a couple of hours after I should have thought of it, I realize that chickens don’t drink milk, they peck corn.

  “And when I do produce it, the findings aren’t going to be ‘accidental death.’ The charge is going to be murder in the first degree—with a cobra for a weapon.”

  Whereupon, he goes and throws cold water all over me. “You can produce dozens of ‘em,” he tells me, shaking his head. “You can empty the whole zoo into this house, and I still can’t put anything like that into my report.”

  I nearly have pups all over the carpet. “Why? For Pete’s sake, why?”

  “Because, for anyone to die of snake bite, there has to be a bite—first of all. The fangs of any snake would leave a puncture, a livid mark, a zone of discoloration. What do you suppose my assistant and I were doing all night, sitting playing rummy? I tell you we went over every inch of body surface with the highest-powered microscopes available. There wasn’t a blemish. Absolutely no place anywhere into which the venom could have been injected.”

  I throw all the possibilities that occur to me at him one after the other. I’m not a trained doc, remember. An)nvay, he squelches them as fast as they come.

  “When you examined the blood stream, or what was left of it, weren’t there heavier traces of this stuff in some parts than others? Couldn’t you track it down from there?”

  “It’s very volatile. It diffuses itself all over the system, like lightning, once it’s in. Does away with itself as a specific. It’s not a blood poison, it’s a nerve poison. You can tell it’s there by the effects rather than by the cause.”

  “How about a hypodermic needle?”

  “That would have left a swelling—and a puncture too; even if smaller than the snake’s fangs, even if invisible to the naked eye.”

  “How about internally?”

&nb
sp; “It doesn’t kill internally. We analyzed the contents of his stomach. Nothing foreign there, nothing harmful.”

  I move the position of one of the chairs in the room rather suddenly—with my foot. “What a temper,” he says reproachfully.

  “Maybe I’ve stuck too close to the village green,” I let him know. “Maybe I should have had L. A. in on this.”

  “Suit yourself. But, if you go over our heads like that, you better have a direct accusation ready—and be able to back it up. I can’t support you if it comes to a showdown. This report’ll have to stay the way it is—‘paralysis of the nerve centers, of unknown origin’—take it or leave it.”

  “You take it,” I say violently, and I tell him a good place to keep it while I’m at it. “You get L. A. on the wire for me when you go back,” I order him as he prepares to leave in a huff, “and have ‘em send a squad up here with butterfly nets and insect guns. We’re gonna play cops and robbers.” And when he takes his departure we don’t say goodbye to each other.

  I lock the front door on the inside and ditto the back door and drop both keys into my pocket. Then I latch all the shutters and fasten down all the windows with a hammer and wedges of wood. She isn’t going to get away from here until I’ve cinched this thing one way or the other, and I’ve got to be having some sleep soon. I can’t hold out forever.

  I go upstairs, and there’s not a sound around me. It’s been light out for a long time now, but the upstairs hallway is still dim, and at the end of it, where the kid’s room is, lamplight is shining through the crack of his door. I thought he was asleep by now, and I get a little worried for a minute, but when I tap on it and hear him say, “Come in,” I heave a long breath of relief, it’s sweet music to my ears.

  He’s in bed, all right, but he’s propped up reading a book, with a cigarette in his mouth. He hasn’t noticed it got light and he’s forgotten to turn out the lamp. That’s all right—I used to do that too, when I was his age. “Didn’t mean to butt in,” I say. I figure it’s a good time to patch up that little set-to we had downstairs before.

  He beats me to the rap. “I’m sorry about what happened before.”

  “Forget it.” I haul up a chair and sit down alongside the bed, and we’re all set to bury the hatchet and smoke the pipe of peace. “You got me wrong, that was all.” I frisk myself, no results. “Let’s have one of your butts.”

  “I’m out of them myself,” he grins.

  “Then where’d you get that one?” I get a little uncomfortable for a minute. I give it a quick look. It’s just one of the regular-size ones though.

  “One of Veda’s,” he admits. He keeps talking around it without taking it out of his mouth. “I been dragging on it for ages, they last a long time.” So that’s why it’s down to ordinary size! “Now don’t go getting all het up again,” he says as he sees me change color. “I didn’t ask her for it, she offered it to me.”

  I try to remind myself those butts got a clean bill of health. I try to tell myself that if nothing’s happened so far, after he’s smoked it all this time—

  I can hardly stay still on the chair. I lean forward and watch his face anxiously. He seems perfectly normal. “Feel all right, kid?”

  “Never felt better.”

  Then I see something that I haven’t noticed until now, and I go pins and needles all over. “Wait a minute, whatcha been doing? Where’d ya get all that red all over your mouth?”

  He turns all colors of the rainbow and looks guilty. “Aw, there you go again! All right, she kissed me. So what? I couldn’t push her away, could I?”

  My heart’s pounding in my ears and I can hardly talk. It’s too much like the set-up she gave the old man! She was rouging her lips, she was getting set to kiss him when I left them alone, and when I found him he had one of her butts. Still, there’s no use losing my head, nothing’s happened to the kid so far, and if I frighten him—

  I haul out my handkerchief and try to talk slow and easy. “Here, get it off with this. Get it off easy, don’t rub.” My wrist is jerking like sixty as I pass it to him, though. “Just sort of smooth it off, keep your tongue away from it.”

  That’s where the mistake happens. To do it he has to get the cigarette out of the way. He touches it, he parts his lips. It goes with the upper one! It’s adhered, just like the old man’s!

  He flips it out, there isn’t time for me to stop him, he winces and he says “Ow!”

  I’m on my feet like a shot. “What’d you do?”

  “Caught my lip on it,” he says and tosses it down angrily. He’s out of bed before he knows what’s happened to him and I’ve flung him halfway across the room to the door. “Bathroom, quick!” I pant. “One of my razor blades—cut it wide open, split it to the gums if you have to, bleed like a pig, it’s your only chance!”

  He does it, he must read death on my face, for once he doesn’t argue. I don’t go with him, can’t. I’m shaking so, I’d cut his throat. The water gives a roar into the washbasin, he lets out a yell of pain, and he’s done it.

  Second mistake. Opening it up like that only gives all the red stuff a chance to get in. He’s young, maybe he could have fought off the smaller amount that would have penetrated through the original slit. Too late, the examiner’s words come back to me: “It isn’t a blood poison, it’s a nerve poison. Letting the blood out won’t help, it isn’t rattlesnake venom.” I’ve finished him!

  He’s back in the doorway, white as a sheet. Blood’s pouring down his chin and the front of his pajamas look like he’d had a nosebleed. It isn’t a nosebleed; he’s opened the cleft of his lip to the nostrils. It’s started in already though, the poison; it’s in him already, and he doesn’t know what it is.

  “What’d you make me do that for? I feel—” He tries to get to me and totters. Then I guess he knows what it is—for just one minute he knows what it is—that’s all the time he has to know it in.

  I get him onto the bed—that’s all I can do for him—and the rest of it happens there. He just says one thing more. “Don’t let me, will you? Charlie, I dowanna die!” in a voice like a worn-out record running down under a scratchy needle. After that, he’s not recognizable as anything human any more.

  I can’t do anything for him, so I just turn my face to the wall and shut out the rustling with my hands clapped to my ears. “Charlie, I dowanna die!” He isn’t saying it any more, it’s over already, but it goes on and on. For years I’ll probably hear it.

  After awhile I cover him over without looking and I go to my own room. I’ve got a job to do—a job no one but me can do. While I’m in there, there’s a sort of fluttery sound for a minute outside, as though something whisked itself along the hall and down the stairs just then. That’s all right, I took care of the doors and windows before I came up. “Charlie, I dowanna die!” No, no insanity plea. Not this time— that’s too easy. An asylum’s too good.

  I get my gun out of the closet where it’s been since we came here, and I break it. Two slugs in it. Two are enough. I crack it shut again and shove it on my hip. Then I take a long pole that’s standing in a comer, the handle of a floor-mop or something, and I go across the hall to her room. She’s pounding on the door downstairs. I can hear her shaking it, clawing at it, trying to get out of the house. She can wait.

  I shift the chicken coop around so it faces my way, and zing, zing, zing goes the wire netting. Then I step back and prod the hinged slat open with the end of the long pole. Then I dig the pole into the bedclothes and loosen them up. There’s no wire mesh over the place that the one movable slat covers. There’s sort of a wicket left in it there, and out through that wicket comes the hooded head, the slow, coiling, glistening length of one of the world’s deadly things, the king cobra of India! I see Veda’s twin before my dilating eyes. The same scaly, gleaming covering; even the same marking like a question-mark on its hood! Endless lengths of it come out, like gigantic black-and-green toothpaste out of a squeezed tube, and I want to throw up in revulsion. Tw
elve feet of it—a monster. The story might have ended then, right in the room there—but the thing is torpid, sluggish from the cold climate and its long confinement.

  It sees me, standing back across the room from it. Slowly it rears up, waist high, balancing on tightening coils for the thrust. Quickly the horrid hood swells, fills out with animosity. There’s not a sound in the room. I’m not breathing. The pounding and the lunging at the door downstairs has stopped some time ago. And in the silence I suddenly know that she’s come back into the room with me, that she’s standing somewhere right behind me.

  I dare not turn around and look; dare not take my eyes off the swaying, dancing funnel of death before me for an instant. But I feel a weight suddenly gone from my hip. She’s got my gun!

  Over my shoulder comes a whisper. “You’ve locked death into the house with you.”

  The split second seems to expand itself into an hour. She edges her way along the wall until she comes into my range of vision. But my eyes can’t even flicker toward her. I know my own gun’s on me. But rather that than the other death.

  Suddenly, I dip on buckled knees. I heave the long pole out from the bed like a fishing rod. A scarlet blanket and sheet come with it. The sheet drops off on the way, the blanket, heavier, clings to the end. The loathsome, fetid mouth of the thing below it has already gone wide. The blanket falls in swift effacement, covers the monster in stifling folds just as its head has gone back in the last preparatory move.

  A fraction of an instant later, there is a lightning lunge against the blanket. A bulge appears there which soon is gone again—where the snake’s head struck after its spring. After that, everything is squirming, thrashing, cataleptic movement under the folds as it tries to free itself.

  There’s a flash of fire from the wall and my hand bums—but if I drop that pole I’m gone. I wield the mop-handle in my bleeding, tortured hand, making it hiss through the air, flattening the blanket under it. It breaks in two under the terrific impacts, but I keep on with the short end of it until there’s no life under that blanket any more. Even then I step on the mess and grind and stamp with my steel-rimmed heels until the blanket discolors in places.