The Escape of Mr. Trimm

by Irvin S. Cobb

  III

  AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET

  "See if he's still there, will you?" said the man listlessly, as ifknowing in advance what the answer would be.

  The woman, who, like the man, was in her stocking feet, crossed theroom, closing the door with all softness behind her. She felt her waysilently through the darkness of a small hallway, putting first her earand then her eye to a tiny cranny in some thick curtains at a frontwindow.

  She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streetsthat is precisely like forty other New York side streets: two unbrokenlines of high-shouldered, narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses, risingin abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow riverof roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channelintermittently like scattered stepping stones; and on either side wide,flat pavements, as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark andleft bare its shallow banks. Daylight would have shown most of thehouses boarded up, with diamond-shaped vents, like leering eyes, cut inthe painted planking of the windows and doors; but now it was nighttime--eleven o'clock of a wet, hot, humid night of the late summer--andthe street was buttoned down its length in the double-breasted fashionof a bandmaster's coat with twin rows of gas lamps evenly spaced. Undereach small circle of lighted space the dripping, black asphalt had aslimy, slick look like the sides of a newly caught catfish. Elsewherethe whole vista lay all in close shadow, black as a cave mouth underevery stoop front and blacker still in the hooded basement areas. Only,half a mile to the eastward a dim, distant flicker showed where Broadwayran, a broad, yellow streak down the spine of the city, and high abovethe broken skyline of eaves and cornices there rolled in cloudy wavesthe sullen red radiance, born of a million electrics and the flares fromgas tanks and chimneys, which is only to be seen on such nights as this,giving to the heaven above New York that same color tone you find in anartist's conception of Babylon falling or Rome burning.

  From where the woman stood at the window she could make out the round,white, mushroom top of a policeman's summer helmet as its wearer leanedback, half sheltered under the narrow portico of the stoop just belowher; and she could see his uniform sleeve and his hand, covered with awhite cotton glove, come up, carrying a handkerchief, and mop the hiddenface under the helmet's brim. The squeak of his heavy shoes was plainlyaudible to her also. While she stayed there, watching and listening, twopedestrians--and only two--passed on her side of the street: a messengerboy in a glistening rubber poncho going west and a man under an umbrellagoing east. Each was hurrying along until he came just opposite her, andthen, as though controlled by the same set of strings, each stoppedshort and looked up curiously at the blind, dark house and at the figurelounging in the doorway, then hurried on without a word, leaving thesilent policeman fretfully mopping his moist face and tugging at thewilted collar about his neck.

  After a minute or two at her peephole behind the window curtains above,the woman passed back through the door to the inner, middle room wherethe man sat.

  "Still there," she said lifelessly in the half whisper that she had cometo use almost altogether these last few days; "still there and sure tostay there until another one just like him comes to take his place. Whatelse did you expect?"

  The man only nodded absently and went on peeling an overripe peach,striking out constantly, with the hand that held the knife, at theflies. They were green flies--huge, shiny-backed, buzzing, persistentvermin. There were a thousand of them; there seemed to be a million ofthem. They filled the shut-in room with their vile humming; they swarmedeverywhere in the half light. They were thickest, though, in a corner atthe back, where there was a closed, white door. Here a great knot ofthem, like an iridescent, shimmering jewel, was clustered about thekeyhole. They scrolled the white enameled panels with intricate,shifting patterns, and in pairs and singly they promenaded busily on thewhite porcelain knob, giving it the appearance of being alive and havinga motion of its own.

  It was stiflingly hot and sticky in the room. The sweat rolled down theman's face as he peeled his peach and pared some half-rotted spots outof it. He protected it with a cupped palm as he bit into it. One hugegreen fly flipped nimbly under the fending hand and lit on the peach.With a savage little snarl of disgust and loathing the man shook theclinging insect off and with the knife carved away the place where itsfeet had touched the soft fruit. Then he went on munching, meanwhilefurtively watching the woman. She was on the opposite side of a smallcenter-table from him, with her face in her hands, shaking her head witha little shuddering motion whenever one of the flies settled on herclose-cropped hair or brushed her bare neck.

  He was a smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about himeven in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in aweakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face atwist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out offocus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavierthan the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than herreal height, seeing that she was dressed, like a half-grown boy, in asoft-collared shirt open at the throat and a pair of loose trousers. Shehad large but rather regular features, pouting lips, a clear brown skinand full, prominent brown eyes; and one of them had a pronounced cast init--an imperfection already made familiar by picture and printeddescription to sundry millions of newspaper readers. For this was EllaGilmorris, the woman in the case of the Gilmorris murder, about whichthe continent of North America was now reading and talking. And thelittle man with the twisted face, who sat across from her, gnawing apeach stone clean, was the notorious "Doctor" Harris Devine, aliasVanderburg, her accomplice, and worth more now to society in his presentuntidy state than ever before at any one moment of his wholediscreditable life, since for his capture the people of the state of NewYork stood willing to pay the sum of one thousand dollars, which tidyreward one of the afternoon papers had increased by another thousand.

  Everywhere detectives--amateurs and the kind who work for hire--wereseeking the pair who at this precise moment faced each other across alittle center-table in the last place any searcher would have suspectedor expected them to be--on the second floor of the house in which thelate Cassius Gilmorris had been killed. This, then, was the situation:inside, these two fugitives, watchful, silent, their eyes red-rimmed forlack of sleep, their nerves raw and tingling as though rasped withfiles, each busy with certain private plans, each fighting offconstantly the touch of the nasty scavenger flies that flickered andflitted iridescently about them; outside, in the steamy, hot drizzle,with his back to the locked and double-locked door, a leg-wearypoliceman, believing that he guarded a house all empty except for suchevidences as yet remained of the Gilmorris murder.

  * * * * *

  It was one of those small, chancy things that so often disarrange thebest laid plots of murderers that had dished their hope of a cleangetaway and brought them back, at the last, to the starting point. Ifthe plumber's helper, who was sent to cure a bathtub of leaking in thehouse next door, had not made a mistake and come to the wrong number;and if they, in the haste of flight, had not left an area doorunfastened; and if this young plumbing apprentice, stumbling his wayupstairs on the hunt for the misbehaving drain, had not opened the whiteenameled door and found inside there what he did find--if this smallsequence of incidents had not occurred as it did and when it did, or ifonly it had been delayed another twenty-four hours, or even twelve,everything might have turned out differently. But fate, to call it byits fancy name--coincidence, to use its garden one--interfered, as itusually does in cases such as this. And so here they were.

  The man had been on his way to the steamship office to get the ticketswhen an eruption of newsboys boiled out of Mail Street into Broadway,with extras on their arms, all shouting out certain words that sent himscurrying back in a panic to the small, obscure family hotel in thelower thirties where the woman waited. From that moment it was she,really, who took the initiative in all the efforts
to break through thedoubled and tripled lines that the police machinery looped about thefive boroughs of the city.

  At dark that evening "Mr. and Mrs. A. Thompson, of Jersey City," a quietcouple who went closely muffled up, considering that it was August, andcarrying heavy valises, took quarters at a dingy furnished room house ona miscalled avenue of Brooklyn not far from the Wall Street ferries andoverlooking the East River waterfront from its bleary back windows. Twohours later a very different-looking pair issued quietly from a sideentrance of this place and vanished swiftly down toward the docks. Thething was well devised and carried out well too; yet by morning thedetectives, already ranging and quartering the town as bird-dogs quartera brier-field, had caught up again and pieced together the broken endsof the trail; and, thanks to them and the newspapers, a good manythousand wide awake persons were on the lookout for a plump,brown-skinned young woman with a cast in her right eye, wearing a boy'sdisguise and accompanied by a slender little man carrying his headslightly to one side, who when last seen wore smoked glasses and had hisface extensively bandaged, as though suffering from a toothache.

  Then had followed days and nights of blind twisting and dodging andhiding, with the hunt growing warmer behind them all the time. Throughthis they were guided and at times aided by things printed in the verypapers that worked the hardest to run them down. Once they ventured asfar as the outer entrance of the great, new uptown terminal, and turnedaway, too far gone and sick with fear to dare run the gauntlet of thewaiting room and the train-shed. Once--because they saw a made-upCentral Office man in every lounging long-shoreman, and were not so farwrong either--they halted at the street end of one of the smaller piersand from there watched a grimy little foreign boat that carried nowireless masts and that might have taken them to any one of half a dozenobscure banana ports of South America--watched her while she hiccoughedout into midstream and straightened down the river for the openbay--watched her out of sight and then fled again to their newest hidingplace in the lower East Side in a cold sweat, with the feeling thatevery casual eye glance from every chance passer-by carried suspicionand recognition in its flash, that every briskening footstep on thepavement behind them meant pursuit.

  Once in that tormented journey there was a sudden jingle of metal, likerattling handcuffs, in the man's ear and a heavy hand fell detaininglyon his shoulder--and he squeaked like a caught shore-bird and shrunkaway from under the rough grips of a truckman who had yanked him clearof a lurching truck horse tangled in its own traces. Then, finally, hadcome a growing distrust for their latest landlord, a stolid Russian Jewwho read no papers and knew no English, and saw in his pale pair ofguests only an American lady and gentleman who kept much to their roomand paid well in advance for everything; and after that, in the hotrainy night, the flight afoot across weary miles of soaking crossstreets and up through ill-lighted, shabby avenues to the one place ofrefuge left open to them. They had learned from the newspapers, at oncea guide and a bane, a friend and a dogging enemy, that the place waslocked up, now that the police had got through searching it, and thatthe coroner's people held the keys. And the woman knew of a faulty catchon a rear cellar window, and so, in a fit of stark desperation borderingon lunacy, back they ran, like a pair of spent foxes circling to aburrow from which they have been smoked out.

  Again it was the woman who picked for her companion the easiest paththrough the inky-black alley, and with her own hands she pulled downnoiselessly the broken slats of the rotting wooden wall at the back ofthe house. And then, soon, they were inside, with the reeking heat ofthe boxed-up house and the knowledge that at any moment discovery mightcome bursting in upon them--inside with their busy thoughts and the busygreen flies. How persistent the things were--shake them off a hundredtimes and back they came buzzing! And where had they all come from?There had been none of them about before, surely, and now theirmaddening, everlasting droning filled the ear. And what nasty creaturesthey were, forever cleaning their shiny wings and rubbing the ends oftheir forelegs together with the loathsome suggestion of littlegrave-diggers anointing their palms. To the woman, at least, these fliesalmost made bearable the realization that, at best, this stopping pointcould be only a temporary one, and that within a few hours a fresh startmust somehow be made, with fresh dangers to face at every turning.

  * * * * *

  It was during this last hideous day of flight and terror that the thingwhich had been growing in the back part of the brain of each of thembegan to assume shape and a definite aspect. The man had the craftiermind, but the woman had a woman's intuition, and she already had readhis thoughts while yet he had no clue to hers. For the primal instinctof self-preservation, blazing up high, had burned away the bond of boguslove that held them together while they were putting her drunkard of ahusband out of the way, and now there only remained to tie them fastthis partnership of a common guilt.

  In these last few hours they had both come to know that together therewas no chance of ultimate escape; traveling together the very disparityof their compared appearances marked them with a fatal and unmistakableconspicuousness, as though they were daubed with red paint from the samepaint brush; staying together meant ruin--certain, sure. Now, then,separated and going singly, there might be a thin strand of hope. Yetthe man felt that, parted a single hour from the woman, and she stillalive, his wofully small prospect would diminish and shrink to thevanishing point--New York juries being most notoriously easy upon womenmurderers who give themselves up and turn state's evidence; and, by thesame mistaken processes of judgment, notoriously hard upon their maleaccomplices--half a dozen such instances had been playing in flashesacross his memory already.

  Neither had so much as hinted at separating. The man didn't speak,because of a certain idea that had worked itself all out hours beforewithin his side-flattened skull. The woman likewise had refrained fromputting in words the suggestion that had been uppermost in her brainfrom the time they broke into the locked house. Some darting look ofquick, malignant suspicion from him, some inner warning sense, held hermute at first; and later, as the newborn hate and dread of him grew andmastered her and she began to canvass ways and means to a certain end,she stayed mute still.

  Whatever was to be done must be done quietly, without a struggle--theleast sound might arouse the policeman at the door below. One thing wasin her favor--she knew he was not armed; he had the contempt and thefear of a tried and proved poisoner for cruder lethal tools.

  It was characteristic also of the difference between these two thatDevine should have had his plan stage-set and put to motion long beforethe woman dreamed of acting. It was all within his orderly scheme of thething proposed that he, a shrinking coward, should have set his squirrelteeth hard and risked detection twice in that night: once to buy abasket of overripe fruit from a dripping Italian at a sidewalk stand,taking care to get some peaches--he just must have a peach, he hadexplained to her; and once again when he entered a dark little store onSecond Avenue, where liquors were sold in their original packages, andbought from a sleepy, stupid clerk two bottles of a cheap domesticchampagne--"to give us the strength for making a fresh start," he toldher glibly, as an excuse for taking this second risk. So, then, with thethird essential already resting at the bottom of an inner waistcoatpocket, he was prepared; and he had been waiting for his opportunityfrom the moment when they crept in through the basement window and felttheir way along, she resolutely leading, to the windowless, shroudedmiddle room here on the second floor.

  * * * * *

  How she hated him, feared him too! He could munch his peaches and uncorkhis warm, cheap wine in this very room, with that bathroom just yonderand these flies all about. From under her fingers, interlaced over herforehead, her eyes roved past him, searching the littered room for thetwentieth time in the hour, looking, seeking--and suddenly they fell onsomething--a crushed and rumpled hat of her own, a milliner'smasterpiece, laden with florid plumage, lying almost behind him on acouch end wher
e some prying detective had dropped it, with a big, roundblack button shining dully from the midst of its damaged tulle crown.She knew that button well. It was the imitation-jet head of a hatpin--asteel hatpin--that was ten inches long and maybe longer.

  She looked and looked at the round, dull knob, like a mystic held by ahypnotist's crystal ball, and she began to breathe a little faster; shecould feel her resolution tighten within her like a turning screw.

  Beneath her brows, heavy and thick for a woman's, her eyes flitted backto the man. With the careful affectation of doing nothing at all, atheatricalism that she detected instantly, but for which she could guessno reason, he was cutting away at the damp, close-gnawed seed of thepeach, trying apparently to fashion some little trinket--a toy basket,possibly--from it. His fingers moved deftly over its slick, wet surface.He had already poured out some of the champagne. One of the pint bottlesstood empty, with the distorted button-headed cork lying beside it, andin two glasses the yellow wine was fast going flat and dead in thatstifling heat. It still spat up a few little bubbles to the surface, asthough minute creatures were drowning in it down below. The man wassweating more than ever, so that, under the single, low-turned gas jet,his crooked face had a greasy shine to it. A church clock down in thenext block struck twelve slowly. The sleepless flies buzzed evilly.

  "Look out again, won't you?" he said for perhaps the tenth time in twohours. "There's a chance, you know, that he might be gone--just a barechance. And be sure you close the door into the hall behind you," headded as if by an afterthought. "You left it ajar once--this light mightshow through the window draperies."

  At his bidding she rose more willingly than at any time before. To reachthe door she passed within a foot of the end of the couch, and watchingover her shoulder at his hunched-up back she paused there for thesmallest fraction of time. The damaged picture hat slid off on the floorwith a soft little thud, but he never turned around.

  The instant, though, that the hall door closed behind her the man'shands became briskly active. He fumbled in an inner pocket of hisunbuttoned waistcoat; then his right hand, holding a small cylindricalvial of a colorless liquid, passed swiftly over one of the two glassesof slaking champagne and hovered there a second. A few tiny globulesfell dimpling into the top of the yellow wine, then vanished; a heavyreek, like the smell of crushed peach kernels, spread through the wholeroom. In the same motion almost he recorked the little bottle, stowed itout of sight, and with a quick, wrenching thrust that bent the smallblade of his penknife in its socket he split the peach seed in twolengthwise and with his thumb-nail bruised the small brown kernel lyingsnugly within. He dropped the knife and the halved seed and begansipping at the undoctored glass of champagne, not forgetting even thento wave his fingers above it to keep the winged green tormentors out.

  The door at the front reopened and the woman came in. Her thoughts werenot upon smells, but instinctively she sniffed at the thick scent on thepoisoned air.

  "I accidentally split this peach seed open," he said quickly, with anelaborate explanatory air. "Stenches up the whole place, don't it? Come,take that other glass of champagne--it will do you good to----"

  Perhaps it was some subtle sixth sense that warned him; perhaps thelightning-quick realization that she had moved right alongside him,poised and set to strike. At any rate he started to fling up hishead--too late! The needle point of the jet-headed hatpin enteredexactly at the outer corner of his right eye and passed backward fornearly its full length into his brain--smoothly, painlessly, swiftly. Hegave a little surprised gasp, almost like a sob, and lolled his headback against the chair rest, like a man who has grown suddenly tired.The hand that held the champagne glass relaxed naturally and the glassturned over on its side with a small tinkling sound and spilled its thincontents on the table.

  It had been easier than she had thought it would be. She stepped back,still holding the hatpin. She moved around from behind him, and then shesaw his face, half upturned, almost directly beneath the low light.There was no blood, no sign even of the wound, but his jaw had droppeddown unpleasantly, showing the ends of his lower front teeth, and hiseyes stared up unwinkingly with a puzzled, almost a disappointed, lookin them. A green fly lit at the outer corner of his right eye; moregreen flies were coming. And he didn't put up his hand to brush it away.He let it stay--he let it stay there.

  With her eyes still fixed on his face, the woman reached out, feelingfor her glass of the champagne. She felt that she needed it now, and ata gulp she took a good half of it down her throat.

  She put the glass down steadily enough on the table; but into her eyescame the same puzzled, baffled look that his wore, and almost gently sheslipped down into the chair facing him.

  Then her jaw lolled a little too, and some of the other flies camebuzzing toward her.