The thing was a spiral, just like the other staircase that led to the head. Or rather, it started out to be, but at the very first half-turnaround it took, the boarding had already showed up, sealing it from top to bottom. That half-turn, however, cut off their lights, which shone in a straight line like any lights would. A triangle of blackness was left in one comer which they couldn’t eliminate, no matter how they maneuvered the torches.
“Come on a little nearer with those things!” I called impatiently. “Come past the chain!”
They wouldn’t budge. “Against orders,” they called back.
I came down a few steps and reached for a torch myself. “Let me have one of those things. What d’ya think I’m doing, playing hide and seek with you? How we won the last war beats me!” I jumped up again and washed out the stubborn wedge of blackness with the thin beam in my hand.
Sure he was there. And fitted in just as neatly as though the space had been measured off for him ahead of time. In a sitting position on the turn of the steps, back propped against the boarding, legs drawn up under him to help keep him propped. I touched the side of his neck. He was as cold already as the metal statue that made a tomb for him.
“Got him,” I shouted laconically. “Come on up and gimme a hand, you two.”
“What’s he doing up there?” one of those two clucks wanted to know.
“Waiting for judgment day.”
They gasped and came on up, orders or no orders.
I bent down and looked at the backs of his shoes. The leather of both heels was scraped and scarred into a fuzz from lift to ankle. The backs of his trousers were dusty all the way to the knees. “Dragged up by the shoulders,” I said, “by just one guy. If there’d been two, one of them would have taken him by the feet, like you’re going to do getting him down out of here.”
“How could one guy, any guy, haul that baby elephant all the way up there?” one of them wanted to know.
“You’d be surprised what one guy can manage to do if he’s scared enough and has to work in a hurry,” I assured him. “All right, get started. I’ll handle your lights. It wasn’t done up here anyway, so let’s get down before we all take a header into the ocean, arm and all.”
It wasn’t easy, even for the two of them, to get down with him. Automatically, I figured that eliminated Alice Colman or any other woman as having had any part in it—except as an accessory.
The thing that had done it was lying under him when they got him up off the ground between them—a wicked-looking iron bar wrapped in a stiffened, blood-brown piece of rag. The wound—it was a deadly fracture—was on the side of the head just over the ear. He hadn’t bled much, outside of the first splash on the padded weapon itself. The little there was after that had clung to the skin, running down behind the jawbone and into the collar of his shirt, hence nothing on the ground around the bench where the attack had occurred.
I examined the ground around the latter place. The two little tracks his heels had made as he was dragged backwards toward the hiding-place were there plain as day under my flashlight’s beam, without the need of any powder or hocus-pocus of any kind. My only wonder was how I’d muffed seeing them when I stooped down to pick up his hat. But of course I hadn’t used my torch then.
“Take him on down the rest of the way,” I said. “No use parking with him here—it’s gotta be done sooner or later anyway.”
They loved the job—yeah they did! They must have lost ten pounds apiece in sweat, getting him down those seventeen stories of narrow, spiral staircase. When they were down at the elevator you could hear their heaving all the way up where I was. When I got down myself— I’d waited on the murder bench until the way was clear, no use dogging their footsteps an inch at a time—Suicide Johnny, with the body tucked into his car and the two guards in a state of collapse alongside of it, was wreathed in smiles. His fondest dream had come true. Something had at last happened. “Gee!” he kept murmuring. “Gee! A moider!”
I had Fatty carried over to the barracks, and an apoplectic-looking guy of Spanish War vintage whose collar was too tight for him came out to see what it was all about.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but there’s just been a crime committed on your jurisdiction—man murdered up in the statue.”
“Who are you, sirrr?” he boomed like a twenty-one gun salute. I felt like I was going to be shot at sunrise for daring to find anything the matter around his diggings.
“Denton, New York Homicide,” I told him.
“Are you sure, sirrrr?” the old rooster crowed. He meant about the murder, not who I was. He wasn’t going to believe me until he saw it with his own eyes, so I took him over and showed it to him.
“Now, just where do I stand?” I said, resting my hand on the stiff’s knee.
“This, sirr,” he orated, “is United States Government property. This is a matter for the Federal inves—”
I’d expected that. “Oh, so I get the air!” I interrupted heatedly. “After I been up and down that blank statue eighty-six times today. O.K., you put who you want on it. I’m going right ahead with it on my own. And we’ll see who comes out ahead!” I got as far as the door, then I turned around and fired at him: “I’ll even give your guy a head-start, just so you can’t accuse me of withholding information. This guy is tagged Colman. He lived until today at the Van Raalte Apartments, Tarrytown, with his wife, who is thin, blond, pretty, blue eyes, about twenty-eight, and very ritzy front. But you won’t find her there any more, so you can tell your guy to save his carfare. She didn’t do it anyway. But if you want to get hold of her, and the guy that actually did it, I’ll tell you where to look for them—”
“Where, sirrr?” he boomed like a great big firecracker.
“Today is Wednesday, isn’t it?” I answered detachedly. “Well, send your guy around to Centre Street, say day after tomorrow, that would be Friday. We’ll be holding ‘em both for you down there by that time. No trouble at all, Field Marshal.” He sort of blew up internally, so I got out before he did anything about calling a firing squad.
I ducked into the statue again, for what I hoped was the last time, and decided to make Suicide Johnny useful, since he seemed to be enjoying himself so. “How would you like to help?” I said. “Come on up with me.”
When we got all the way up to the head, I took out my pocket notebook and opened it at the page where all the names were, the names I’d collected from the ten (eight really, excluding the two kids with their father) who had made the trip here and back on the ferry. Excluding Colman himself and his wife (who couldn’t have been an actual participant for reasons I’ve already given) that left six. Excluding two other women who’d been in the group, that boiled it down to four. Now the name, of course, was going to be phony—I mean the name the actual murderer had handed me—that was a pushover. But that didn’t matter. All I wanted was to connect the right guy with any name, phony or otherwise, just so I could remember something about what he’d looked like. Any little thing at all.
“You take a pencil,” I told Suicide, “and each time I call out a name, you cross off the corresponding one written down there in that book. That’s all.”
“Gee!” he said. “I’m helping a real detective!”
“My chief,” I answered drily, “sometimes has grave doubts about that. Ready? Let’s go.” I started going over the window-ledges inch by inch. They were crawling with names and initials, but I finally located one that matched one in the notebook. Johnny promptly crossed it out. Then another. Then a triple initial that matched. “Don’t cross yet,” I warned him, “just put a check next to that.”
Well, when we got through, we had nine of the ten names, women, kids and all. Each and every one of them had scribbled their names as mementoes on the stone work. “Now, which one’s left over?” I asked Suicide.
He screwed up his face and read off: “Vincent Scanlon, 55 Amboy Street, Brooklyn, real estate.”
“On circumstantial alone, that’s my gu
y.”
“Hully mackerel!” said the enraptured Johnny. “Can y’tell just by hearing his name like that?”
“His name ain’t Scanlon, he don’t live on Amboy Street, and he’s not in real estate,” I tried to explain. “But he’s the only one of the bunch that didn’t come up here and scrawl his John Hancock. Me and the fat guy were the last ones coming up the stairs. When I left him on the bench he was still alive. When I got up here myself even his wife was up here ahead of me, and all the others had finished their signatures and were on their way down again. Therefore, this guy who tags himself Scanlon was the murderer. Don’t you understand, he never went all the way to the top. He either came up the stairs behind me and the fat guy, or else if he was ahead of us switched into the opening that leads up into the arm, let everyone else go by, and then crept down again to where the bench was—and did his dirty work the minute the coast was clear.”
I took a notebook from him, held it open before me, and did my damndest to try and separate the party that had given me that name from the other ten. I tried to remember some feature about him, some detail, anything at all, and couldn’t, no matter how I racked my brains. There had been too many of them at one time, all getting off the ferry at once, all stopping in front of me just for a half-minute or so. He should have been nervous, just coming away from doing a thing like that, should have been pale, tense, jumpy, anything you want to call it—should have given himself away in some way, if not right then, then now that I was thinking back over it. But he either hadn’t, or—what was more likely—I was pretty much of a wash-out at my own business. I couldn’t even get him by elimination, the way I had gotten his phony name. One or two of the others started to come clear—the father of the two kids, the two other women besides Alice Colman—but not him. I might just as well have written down that name out of my own head for all I could remember of the man who had given it to me.
I took another look at Alice Colman’s regards to the statue and wondered why she hadn’t put her name down with it, and how she had come to be mixed up on her dates the way she had. And why a different address from her own. Of course the obvious answer was that she knew g.d. well what was taking place on that stairway below at the time, and was too nervous to know what she was doing. But she hadn’t acted nervous at all, she had just acted dreamy. So that probably wasn’t the answer at all. And just for luck I transcribed the thing into my notebook exactly as it stood in eyebrow pencil.
4/24/35/4 and then, 254W51. Wrong date, right hour, wrong address,
no name. “I take it all back, Johnny,” I said wearily. “Kick me here—and
here. The guy did come up here after all—and right on top of what he
did too.” “But he didn’t write nothing—you looked all over them wind—” “He didn’t come up here to write, he came to read.” I pointed at it.
“He came to read that. Let’s go down. I guess I can keep my promise to
General Lafayette down there after all.”
When I got ashore I halfheartedly checked Colman at the Tarrytown Apartments once more. No, neither Mr. nor Mrs. had come back yet, they told me after paging them on the house phone. I didn’t tell them so, but they might just as well have hung out a to-let sign and gotten ready to rent that apartment all over again. He wasn’t coming back any more because he was spending the night at the morgue. And she wasn’t coming back any more either—because she had a heavy date at 4. As for Scanlon’s Amboy Street address, I didn’t even bother with it. Have to use your common sense once in awhile. Instead I asked Information to give me 254 West 51st Street, which was the best I could make out of the tag end of her billet-doux.
“Capital Bus Terminal,” a voice answered at the other end.
So that’s where they were going to meet, was it? They’d stayed very carefully away from each other on the ferry going back, and ditto once they were ashore in New York. But they were going to blow town together. So it looked like she hadn’t had her days mixed after all, she’d known what she was doing when she put tomorrow’s date down. “What’ve you got going out at four?” I said.
“A.M. or P.M.?” said the voice. But that was just the trouble, I didn’t know myself. Yet if I didn’t know, how was he going to know either? I mean Scanlon. The only thing to do was tackle both meridians, one at a time. A.M. came first, so I took that. He spieled off a list a foot long but the only big-time places among them were Boston and Philly. “Make me a reservation on each,” I snapped.
“Mister,” the voice came back patiently, “how can you go two places at once?”
“I’m twins,” I squelched and hung up. Only one more phone call, this time to where I was supposed to live but so seldom did. “I may see you tomorrow. If I came home now I’d only have to set the alarm for three o’clock.”
“I thought it was your day off.”
“I’ve got statues on the brain.”
“You mean you would have if you had a—” she started to say, but I ended that.
I staggered into the bus waiting room at half past three, apparently stewed to the gills, with my hat brim turned down to meet my upturned coat collar. They just missed each other enough to let my nose through, the rest was shadow. I wasn’t one of those drunks that make a show of themselves and attract a lot of attention, I just slumped onto a bench and quietly went to sleep. Nobody gave me a first look, let alone a second one.
I was on the row of benches against the wall, not out in the middle where people could sit behind me. At twenty to four by the clock I suddenly remembered exactly what this guy Scanlon had looked like on the ferry that afternoon. Red hair, little pig-eyes set close together—what difference did it make now, there he was, valise between his legs. He had a newspaper up over his face in a split second, but a split second is plenty long enough to remember a face in.
But I didn’t want him alone, didn’t dare touch him alone until she got there, and where the hell was she? Quarter to, the clock said—ten to—five. Or were they going to keep up the bluff and leave separately, each at a different time, and only get together at the other end? Maybe that message on the statue hadn’t been a date at all, only his instructions. I saw myself in for a trip to Philly, Boston, what-have-you, and without a razor, or an assignment from the chief.
The handful of late-night travelers stirred, got up, moved outside to the bus, got in, with him very much in the middle of them. No sign of her. It was the Boston one. I strolled back and got me a ticket, round-trip. Now all that should happen would be that she should breeze up and take the Philly one—and me without anyone with me to split the assignment!
“Better hurry, stew,” said the ticket seller handing me my change, “you’re going to miss that bus.”
“Mr. Stew to you,” I said mechanically, with a desperate look all around the empty waiting room. Suddenly the door of the ladies’ restroom flashed open and a slim, sprightly figure dashed by, lightweight valise in hand. She must have been hiding in there for hours, long before he got here.
“Wait a minute!” she started to screech to the driver the minute she hit the open. “Wait a minute! Let me get on!” She just made it, the door banged, and the thing started.
There was only one thing for me to do. I cut diagonally across the lot, and when the driver tried to make the turn that would take him up Fifty-first Street I was wavering in front of his headlights. Wavering but not budging. “Wash’ya hurry?” I protested. His horn racketed, then he jammed on his brakes, stuck his head out the side, and showed just how many words he knew that he hadn’t learned in Sunday School.
“Open up,” I said, dropping the drunk act and flashing my badge. “You don’t come from such nice people. And just like that”—I climbed aboard—“you’re short three passengers. Me—and this gentleman here—and, let’s see, oh yeah, this little lady trying so hard to duck down behind the seat. Stand up, sister, and get a new kind of bracelet on your lily-white wrist.”
Somebody or other screamed and went into a fa
int at the sight of the gun, but I got them both safely off and waved the awe-stricken driver on his way.
“And now,” I said as the red tail lights burned down Eighth Avenue and disappeared, “are you two going to come quietly or do I have to try out a recipe for making goulash on you?”
“What was in it for you?” I asked her at Headquarters. “This Romeo of yours is no Gable for looks.”
“Say lissen,” she said scornfully, accepting a cigarette, “if you were hog-tied to something that weighed two hundred ninety pounds and couldn’t even take off his own shoes, but made three grand a month, and banked it in your name, and someone came along that knew how to make a lady’s heart go pit-a-pat, you’d a done the same thing too!”
I went home and said: “Well, I’ve gotta hand it to you. I looked at a statue like you told me to, and it sure didn’t hurt my record any.” But I didn’t tell which statue or why. “What’s more,” I said, “we’re going down to Washington and back over the week-end.”
“Why Washington?” my wife wanted to know.
“Cause they’ve got the biggest of the lot down there, called the Washington Monument. And a lotta guys that think they’re good, called Federal dicks, hang out there and need help.”
(1935)
Dark Melody of Madness
At four in the morning, a sccirecrow of a man staggers dazedly into the New Orleans Police Headquarters building. Behind him at the curb, a lacquered Bugatti purrs like a drowsy cat, the swellest thing that ever parked out there. He weaves his way through the anteroom, deserted at that early hour, and goes in through the open doorway beyond. The sleepy desk-sergeant looks up; an idle detective scanning yesterda)r’s Times-Picayune tipped back on the two hind legs of a chair against the wall raises his head; and as the funnel of light from the cone overhead plays up their visitor like a flashlight-pwwder, their mouths drop open and their eyes bat a couple of times. The two front legs of the detective’s chair come down with a thump. The sergeant braces himself, eager, friendly, with the heels of both hands on his desk-top and his elbows up in the air. A patrolman comes in from the back room, wiping a drink of water from his mouth. His jaw also hangs when he sees who’s there. He sidles nearer the detective and says behind the back of his hand, “That’s Eddie Bloch, ain’t it?”
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 18