Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  The detective doesn’t even take time off to answer. It’s like telling him what his own name is. The three stare at the figure under the conelight, interested, respectful, almost admiring. There’s nothing professional in their scrutiny, they’re not the police studying a suspect; they’re nobodies getting a look at a celebrity. They take in the rumpled tuxedo, the twig of gardenia that’s shed its petals, the tie hanging open in two loose ends. His topcoat was slung across his arm originally; now it trails along the dusty station-house floor behind him. He gives his hat the final, tortured push that dislodges it. It drops and rolls away behind him. The cop picks it up and brushes it off—he never was a bootlicker in his life, but this guy is Eddie Bloch.

  Still it’s his face, more than who he is or how he’s dressed, that would draw stares an5rwhere. It’s the face of a dead man—^the face of a dead man on a living body. The shadowy shape of the skull seems to peer through the transparent skin; you can make out its bone-structure as though an X-ray were playing it up. The eyes are stunned, shocked, haunted gleams, set in a veist hollow that bisects the face like a mask. No amount of drink or dissipation could do this to anyone, only long illness and the foreknowledge of death. You see faces like that looking up at you from hospital cots when all hope has been abandoned—^when the grave is already waiting.

  Yet strangely enough, they knew who he was just now. Instant recognition of who he had been came first—realization of the shape he’s in comes after that—^more slowly. Possibly it’s because all three of them have been called to identify corpses in the morgue in their day. Their minds are trained along those lines. And this man’s face is known to hundreds of people. Not that he has ever broken or even firactured the most trivial law, but he has spread happiness around him—set a million feet to dancing in his time.

  The desk sergeant’s expression changes. The patrolman mutters imder his breath to the detective. “Looks like he just came out of a bad smash-up with his car.” “More like a binge to me,” einswers the detective. They’re simple men, capable, but those are the only explanations they can find for what they now see before them.

  The desk sergeant speaks.

  “Mr. Eddie Bloch, am I right?” He extends his hand across the desk in greeting.

  The man can hardly seem to stand up. He nods, he doesn’t take the hand.

  “Is there anything wrong, Mr. Bloch? Is there anything we can do for you?” The detective and the patrolman come over. “Run in and get him a drink of water, Latour,” the sergeant says anxiously. “Have an accident, Mr. Bloch? Been held up?”

  The man steadies himself by stiflF-arming himself against the edge of the sergeant’s desk. The detective extends an arm behind him in case he should go backwards. He keeps fiimbhng, continually fumbling in his clothes. The tuxedo swims on him ais his movements shift it around. He’s down to about a himdred pounds, they notice. Out comes the gun, and he doesn’t even seem to have strength to lift it. He pushes it and it skids a little way across the desk-top, then spins around and faces back at him.

  ‘Tve killed a man. Just now. Little while ago. 3:30.” He speaks, and if the unburied dead ever spoke, this is the voice the^d use.

  They’re completely floored. They almost don’t know how to handle the situation for a minute. They deal with killers every day, but killers have to be gone out aft«r and dragged in. And when fame and wealth enter into it, as they do once in a great while, fancy lawyers and protective barriers spring up like wildfire to hedge them in on all sides. This main is one of the ten idols of America, or was until just lately. People like him don’t kill people. They don’t come in out of nowhere at four in the morning and stand before a simple desk sergeant and a simple detective, stripped to their naked souls, shorn of almost all resemblance to humanity.

  There’s silence in the room—^for just a minute—a silence you could cut with a knife. Then he speaks again, in agony. “I tell you I’ve killed a man! Don’t stamd looking at me like that! I’ve k—!”

  The sergeant speaks, gently, sympathetically. “What’s the matter, Mr. Bloch, been working too hard?” The sergeant comes out from behind the desk. “Come on inside with as. You stay here, Latour, and take the phone.”

  And when the^ve taken him into the back room: “Gtet him a chair, Humphries. Here, drink some of this water, Mr. Bloch. Now what’s it all about?” The sergeant has brought the gun in with him. He passes it before his nose, then cracks it open. He looks at the detective. “He’s used it all right.”

  “Was it an accident, Mr. Bloch?” the detective prompts respectfully. The man in the chair shakes his head. He’s started to shiver all over, although the New Orleans night outside is warm and mellow. “Who’d you do it to? Who was it?” the sergeaint puts in.

  ‘T don’t know his name,” Bloch mumbles. “I never have. They call him Papa Benjamin.”

  His two interrogators exchange a puzzled look. “Sounds like—” The detective doesn’t finish it. Instead he turns to the seated figure and asks almost perfunctorily: “He was a white man, of course, wasn’t he?”

  “He was colored,” is the imexpected answer.

  The thing gets more crazy, more inexplicable, at every turn. How should a man like Eddie Bloch, one of the country’s ace bandsmen, pulling down his two-and-a-half grand every week for playing at the Bataclan, come to kill a nameless colored man—^then be pulled all to pieces by it? These two men in their time have never seen anj^hing like it; they have put suspects through forty-eight-hour grillings and yet compared to him now, those suspects were fresh as daisies when they got through with them.

  He has said it was no accident and he has said it was no hold-up. They shower him with questions, not to break him down but rather to try and pull him together. “What’d he do, talk out of turn to you? Forget himself? Get wise?” This is the Southland, remember.

  The man’s head goes from side to side like a pendulum.

  “Did you go out of your head for a minute? Is that how it was?”

  Again a nodded no.

  The man’s condition has suggested one angle to the detective’s mind. He looks around to make sure the patrolman outside isn’t listening. Then very discreetly: “Are you a needle-user, Mr. Bloch? Was he your source?”

  The man looks up at them. “I’ve never touched a thing I shouldn’t. A doctor will tell you that in a minute.”

  “Did he have something on you? Was it blackmail?”

  Bloch fumbles some more in his clothes; again they dance around on his skeletonized frame. Suddenly he takes out a cube of money, as thick as it is wide, more money than these two men have ever seen before in their lives. “There’s three thousand dollars there,” he says simply, and tosses it down like he did the gun. “I took it with me tonight, tried to give it to him. He could have had twice as much, three times as much, if he’d said the word, if he’d only let up on me. He wouldn’t take it. That was when I had to kill him. That was all there was left for me to do.” “What was he doing to you?” They both say it together.

  “He was killing me.” He holds out his arm and shoots his cuff. The wristbone is about the size of the sergeant’s own thumb-joint. The expensive platinum wrist-watch that encircles it has been pulled in to the last possible notch and yet it still hangs almost like a bracelet. “See? I’m down to 102. When my shirt’s off, my heart’s so close to the surface you can see the skin right over it move like a pulse with each beat.”

  They draw back a little, almost they wish he hadn’t come in here. That he had headed for some other precinct instead. From the very beginning they have sensed something here that is over their heads, that isn’t to be found in any of the instruction-books. Now they come out with it. “How?” Humphries asks. “How was he killing you?”

  There’s a flare of torment from the man. “Don’t you suppose I would have told you long ago, if I could? Don’t you suppose I would have come in here weeks ago, months ago, and demanded protection, asked to be saved—if I could have told you what it wa
s? If you would have believed me?”

  “We’ll believe you, Mr. Bloch,” the sergeant says soothingly. “We’ll believe anything. Just tell us “

  But Bloch in turn shoots a question at them, for the first time since he has come in. “Answer me! Do you believe in anything you can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch ?”

  “Radio,” the sergeant suggests not very brightly, but Humphries answers more frankly: “No.”

  The man slumps down again in his chair, shrugs apathetically. “If you don’t, how can I expect you to believe me? I’ve been to the biggest

  doctors, biggest scientists in the world They wouldn’t believe me.

  How can I expect you to? You’ll simply say I’m cracked, and let it go at

  that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in an asylum ” He

  breaks off and sobs. “And yet it’s true, it’s true!”

  They’ve gotten into such a maze that Humphries decides it’s about time to snap out of it. He asks the one simple question that should have been asked long ago, and the hell with all this mumbo-jumbo. “Are you sure you killed him?” The man is broken physically and he’s about ready to crack mentally too. The whole thing may be an hallucination.

  “I know I did. I’m sure of it,” the man answers calmly. “I’m already beginning to feel a little better. I felt it the minute he was gone.”

  If he is, he doesn’t show it. The sergeant catches Humphries’ eye and meaningfully taps his forehead in a sly gesture.

  “Suppose you take us there and show us,” Humphries suggests. “Can you do that? Where’d it happen, at the Bataclan?”

  “I told you he was colored,” Bloch answers reproachfully. Bataclan is tony. “It was in the Vieux Carr6.1 can show you where, but I can’t drive any more. It was all I could do to get down here with my car.”

  “I’ll put Desjardins on it with you,” the sergeant says, and calls through the door to the patrolman: “Ring Dij and tell him to meet Humphries at comer of Canal and Royal right away!” He turns and looks at the huddle on the chair. “Buy him a bracer on the way. It don’t look like he’ll last till he gets there.”

  The man flushes a little—it would be a blush if he had any blood left in him. “I can’t touch alcohol any more. I’m on my last legs. It goes

  right through me like ” He hangs his head, then raises it again.

  “But I’ll get better now, little by little, now that he’s “

  The sergeant takes Humphries out of earshot. “Pushover for a padded cell. If it’s on the up-and-up, and not just a pipe dream, call me right back. I’ll get the commissioner on the wire.”

  “At this hour of the night?”

  The sergeant motions toward the chair with his head. “He’s Eddie Bloch, isn’t he?”

  Humphries takes him under the elbow, pries him up from the chair. Not roughly, but just briskly, energetically. Now that things are at last getting under way, he knows where he’s at; he can handle them. He’ll still be considerate, but he’s business-like now; he’s into his routine. “All right, come on, Mr. Bloch, let’s get up there.”

  “Not a scratch goes down on the blotter until I’m sure what I’m doing,” the sergeant calls after Humphries. “I don’t want this whole town down on my neck tomorrow morning.”

  Humphries almost has to hold him up on the way out and into the car. “This it?” he says. “Wow!” He just touches it with his nail and they’re off like velvet. “How’d you ever get this into the Vieux Carr6 without knocking over the houses?”

  Two gleams deep in the skull jogging against the upholstery, dimmer than the dashboard lights, are the only sign that there’s life beside him, “Used to park it blocks away—go on foot.”

  “Oh, you went there more than once?”

  “Wouldn’t you—to beg for your life?”

  More of that screwy stuff, Humphries thinks disgustedly. Why should a man like Eddie Bloch, star of the mike and the dance-floor, go to some colored man in the slums and beg for his life?

  Royal Street comes whistling along. He swerves in toward the curb, shoves the door out, sees Desjardins land on the running-board with one foot. Then he veers out into the middle again without even having stopped. Desjardins moves in on the other side of Bloch, finishes dressing by knotting his necktie and buttoning his vest. “Where’d you get the Aquitania?” he wants to know, and then, with a look beside him: “Holy Kreisler, Eddie Bloch! We had you only tonight on my Emerson “

  “Matter?” Humphries squelches. “Got a talking-jag?”

  “Turn,” says a hollow sound between them, and three wheels take the Bugatti around into North Rampart Street. “Have to leave it here,” he says a little later, and they get out. Congo Square, the old stamping-ground of the slaves.

  “Help him,” Humphries tells his mate tersely, and they each brace him by an elbow.

  Staggering between them with the uneven gait of a punch-drunk pug, quick and then slow by turns, he leads them down a ways, and then suddenly cuts left into an alley that isn’t there at all until you’re smack in front of it. It’s just a crack between two houses, noisome as a sewer. They have to break into Indian file to get through at all. But Bloch can’t fall down; the walls almost scrape both his shoulders at once. One’s in front, one behind him. “You packed?” Humphries calls over his head to Desjardins, up front.

  “Catch cold without it,” the other’s voice comes back out of the gloom.

  A slit of orange shows up suddenly from under a windowsill and a shapely coffee-colored elbow scrapes the ribs of the three as they squirm by. “This far ‘nough, honey,” a liquid voice murmurs.

  “Bad girl! Wash y’mouth out with soap,” the unromantic Humphries warns over his shoulder without even looking around. The sliver of light vanishes as quickly as it came ….

  The passage widens out in places into mouldering courtyards dating back to French or Spanish colonial days, and once it goes under an archway and becomes a tunnel for a short distance. Desjardins cracks his head and swears with talent and abandon.

  “Y’left out ” the rearguard remarks dryly.

  “Here,” pants Bloch weakly, and stops suddenly at a patch of blackness in the wall. Humphries washes it with his torch and crumbling mildewed stone steps show up inside it. Then he motions Bloch in, but the man hangs back, slips a notch or two lower down against the opposite wall that supports him. “Lemme stay down here! Don’t make me go up there again,” he pleads. “I don’t think I can make it any more. I’m afraid to go back in there.”

  “Oh no!” Humphries says with quiet determination. “You’re showing us,” and scoops him away from the wall with his arm. Again, as before, he isn’t rough about it, just business-like. Dij keeps the lead, watering the place with his own torch. Humphries trains his on the band-leader’s forty-dollar custom-made patent-leathers jerking frightenedly upward before him. The stone steps turn to wood ones splintered with usage. They have to step over a huddled black drunk, empty bottle cradled in his arms. “Don’t light a match,” Dij warns, pinching his nose. “There’ll be an explosion.”

  “Grow up,” snaps Humphries. The Cajun’s a good dick, but can’t he realize the man in the middle is roasting in hell-fire? “This is no time “

  “In here is where I did it. I closed the door again after me.” Bloch’s skull-face is all silver with his life-sweat as one of their torches flicks past it.

  Humphries shoves open the sagging mahogany panel that was first hung up when a Louis was still king of France and owned this town. The light of a lamp far across a still, dim room flares up and dances crazily in the draught. They come in and look.

  There’s an old broken-down bed, filthy with rags. Across it there’s a motionless figure, head hanging down toward the floor. Dij cups his hand under it and lifts it. It comes up limply toward him, like a small basketball. It bounces down again when he lets it go—even seems to bob slightly for a second or two after. It’s an old, old colored man, up in his eighties, ev
en beyond. There’s a dark spot, darker than the weazened skin, just under one bleared eye, and another in the thin fringe of white wool that circles the back of the skull.

  Humphries doesn’t wait to see any more. He turns, flips out, and down, and all the way back to wherever the nearest telephone can be found, to let headquarters know that it’s true after all and they can rouse the police commissioner. “Keep him there with you, Dij,” his voice trails back from the inky stairwell, “and no quizzing. Pull in your horns till we get our orders!” That scarecrow with them tries to stumble after him and get out of the place, groaning: “Don’t leave me here! Don’t make me stay here !”

  “I wouldn’t quiz you on my own, Mr. Bloch,” Dij tries to reassure him, nonchalantly sitting down on the edge of the bed next to the corpse and retying his shoelace. “I’ll never forget it was your playing Love in Bloom on the air one night in Baton Rouge two years ago gave me the courage to propose to my wife—”

  But the Commissioner would, and does, in his office a couple hours later. He’s anything but eager about it, too. They’ve tried to shunt him, Bloch, off their hands in every possible legal way open to them. No go. He sticks to them like flypaper. The old colored man didn’t try to attack him, or rob him, or blackmail him, or kidnap him, or anything else. The gun didn’t go off” accidentally, and he didn’t fire it on the spur of the moment either, without thinking twice, or in a flare of anger. The Commissioner almost beats his own head against the desk in his exasperation as he reiterates over and over: “But why? Why? Why?” And for the steenth time, he gets the same indigestible answer: “Because he was killing me.”

  “Then you admit he did lay hands on you?” The first time the poor Commissioner asked this, he said it with a spark of hope. But this is the tenth or twelfth and the spark died out long ago.