Hunt in the Dark

by Q. Patrick

  Douds gasped. Dora Churt’s face was very pale. “But I—I still don’t….” began Miss Goodson.

  “The newly-decorated store only opened yesterday and everyone was strange to it. Miss Churt knew that if she stood in the right place and pointed out a woman by the entrance, both of you wouldn’t realize that the woman was in fact only her own reflection in that unfamiliar black mirror. The distortion of the mirror made her reflection seem shorter than she is; the blackness of it made her light hair look darker and her jade green dress look black.”

  Macrae grinned. “The world’s going to lose a promising murderess in you, Miss Churt. Pinning the crime on your own reflection. Well, what d’you know?”

  This Way Out

  He had done it. For eighteen long, bitter months he had been living for this moment. He had expected to feel a huge sense of relief. But there was nothing like that. If he felt anything, it was a faint disgust.

  Steve Glenn glanced down at the man sprawled across the gray and green carpet. Tony 7hadn’t put up much of a fight. He had crumpled under the first or second impact of Steve’s fist. That was part of what was wrong. Blood trickled from Tony’s mouth, and a bruise darkened the skin around his left eye. There was a splash of scarlet also on the prim white of his tuxedo shirt front. He looked such a trivial thing to have wrecked Steve’s life—a puppet Don Juan stuffed with sawdust. That was part of what was wrong, too.

  “Celia,” Steve murmured.

  Maybe by saying Celia’s name, he could restore the mood which had brought him to the apartment. It didn’t work. Celia seemed infinitely far away. And Tony Dort seemed—nothing.

  Steve felt in the breast pocket of his worn army blouse for a cigarette. He pulled out a twisted, empty package. He threw it on the floor and glanced around him. There were no cigarette boxes. He dropped on one knee and felt in the breast pocket of Tony’s tuxedo jacket. His probing fingers found a wallet and a thin platinum case. He took a cigarette and slipped the case back in Tony’s pocket.

  He’d got cigarettes from worse places in New Guinea, Leyte. He’d rifled them from dead Japs. Who hadn’t? But this was different.

  “I beat him up,” he thought. “Then I bum his cigarettes.” Steve’s unhurried brown eyes, trained to observe every detail,

  shifted their gaze around the room. It was almost cloying in its luxury, like a playboy’s apartment in the movies. Automatically, he compared it with the room he had known for the past three years in the Pacific—from the palm-covered octagonal tents in the Byak to the bare scrubbed building in Fort Dix where, a few hours ago, a solemn young major had handed him his honorable discharge.

  A silver framed photograph of a girl stood on a table by the couch. She was a cool, metallic blonde, whose eyes were set a little too close together. The photograph was signed: “Eternally— Janice.” He wondered whether this was the girl who had come after Celia. Or the girl after the girl after Celia.

  He was glad there wasn’t a photograph of Celia. How would she have signed it? “Eternally,” too?

  Tony moaned and half rolled onto his side. His eyelids flickered. In a couple of minutes he’d be conscious. Steve could at least spare himself the anti-climax of a second squalid scene. On an impulse he only half understood, he bent and wiped the blood from Tony’s mouth with his handkerchief. Then he picked up his hat and left the apartment.

  The civilian-thronged, brightly lighted streets of New York were still new and confusing to Steve. Like all soldiers, he was an arch conservative. Like all recently discharged soldiers, too, he clung to the habit of self-discipline. He knew where he was going. He had planned it all ahead of time and, even though the evening was working out so differently from his expectations, he kept stubbornly to his original idea.

  A couple of blocks down the avenue was a bar where he and Celia used to drop in for a night cap after a show. He was making himself go there alone, because killing his memories of Celia was just as important as giving Tony what was coming to him.

  He pushed through the doors of the Clover Bar. It was a dumpish sort of bar, but Celia had always liked eccentric places, colorful characters. Everything was hauntingly the same. The glaring scarlet jukebox was grinding out Bing Crosby. Bright ceiling lights fanned down. Although it was only eight o’clock the bar was already crowded. Steve found a place at the extreme end. His reflection, tall, tanned, surprisingly grim, glared back at him from the bottle-lined mirror behind the bar.

  The barman moved then and saw him. His face broke into an incredulous, delighted grin. He came hurrying down the bar.

  “Well, well, if it ain’t my old pal Steve. How’s tricks, Sergeant?” He held out his hand. Steve took it in his own strong brown fingers. The barman looked down at the abraded skin on Steve’s knuckles.

  Charlie laughed. “Beating up civilians already?” His face sobered. “Gee, it’s good to see you. Furlough?”

  “Discharge,” Steve said.

  “Happy days. That calls for one on me. Still the same? Rye and water?”

  Steve nodded.

  Charlie poured a jigger of rye. “How’s the wife, Steve? You know something? She’s still the best looking babe ever come in this bar. Never forget her. Just thinking about her makes a guy feel good. She okay?”

  “Celia?” Steve grabbed the jigger of rye. “Sure. She’s okay. She’s around.”

  Someone shouted for a beer. Charlie grinned and hurried away.

  Around. The word stabbed Steve like a knife. That was Celia now. Around. Around every night spot with any guy who had the price in his jeans. One word and you had her. Around.

  Insidious memories crowded into his mind. Celia, grave and absurdly young in her white bride’s dress on their wedding day. Celia on horseback, laughing, her silver blond hair streaming. Celia, as he’d last seen her before he was alerted for overseas shipment. That was the time he had given her the compact. He could see her hands curving around it, that exquisite, white gold compact studded with tiny emeralds which he had persuaded Roy Chappell to design especially for her. He could see her eyes, wide, solemn, gazing up into his.

  “Darling, it’s beautiful. A compact. It’ll be a compact between us, a compact that we’ll never change until you come home.”

  A compact between them!

  From the jukebox, Sinatra was singing an oldie—“Night and Day.” Celia had always stolen nickels from his change to play “Night and Day, under the hide of me.” Steve swallowed his rye. He made himself think of the letter he’d received in New Guinea. Even now, after more than two years, every word was indelibly etched on his memory.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Steve, darling, but pretending is bad, isn’t it? We’ve fought against it, both of us. I swear we have, but it’s no use. I could get the divorce. It won’t be difficult. And Tony will divorce Virginia at the same time. Baby, life is dreary, isn’t it? But I can’t help it, because this is the real thing …”

  The real thing. How could he have been such a fool as to have signed the divorce papers? He’d regarded himself a tragic, heroic figure then. Stepping aside for Celia’s happiness. Yet he’d known Tony for years. He should have realized that Tony was poison to women, and that he’d never have let himself be divorced from the social and financial security of Virginia, that the “real thing” would turn out to be just another shabby affair with a broken heart for Celia.

  Around. The word stole back. There had been plenty of sympathetic friends to write Steve and tell him how very much “around” Celia was, after Tony was through. Around with rich playboys like Goody Taylor. Around and drinking plenty—and not only drinking.

  With a bitter grimace Steve put down his empty glass and walked out of the bar.

  II

  Beating Tony up hadn’t worked. The Clover Bar hadn’t worked. Steve felt even more confused, and inexpressibly lonely. It meant so much to him not to be weak, and yet a burning desire to see Celia just once more had him in its grips.

  He was
passing a store that sold men’s clothes. He paused, gazing without interest at the civilian jackets on their stiff, rounded dummies. He’d have to buy some suits soon. Tomorrow, maybe. He could see his own reflection in the window. The Purple Heart gleamed with the other ribbons on his chest.

  The Purple Heart. He had been wounded for his country and he was supposed to be a hero. Heroes come marching home from the wars. Ticker tape streams from skyscrapers. People cheer. Wives throw themselves into their husbands’ arms, laughing, crying. That’s how heroes come home in books.

  He stood alone on the sidewalk, staring into the store window. That’s what was wrong, he thought. I’ve been kidding myself

  I was the hero of a book. Beating Tony up—that was something like a book. I’ve got to wise up to myself. I’m just a little guy who get roped into a war and then got thrown out again. I’m just a little guy whose girl wanted someone else more than she wanted me.

  Suddenly he felt shame for having done what he’d done to Tony; leaving him there on the floor, bleeding. Maybe he should go back, call a doctor. The idea was so utterly unlike anything he had expected that he could not absorb it at first.

  But it brought a strange excitement, as if he was saving something from the wreck. He had a key to Tony’s apartment, a hangover from the dim, dim days before his marriage when he’d been Tony’s friend and had been given the run of the place.

  Tony’s apartment house was quiet as a Sunday evening. No one was in the vestibule. He had the self-service elevator to himself. Following his only half understood impulse, Steve used the key to let himself into Tony’s top-floor apartment.

  The lights were still burning Tony was still lying there motionless.

  Steve moved toward him. No, Tony wasn’t quite in the same place. He was nearer the fireplace.

  There was more blood on Tony’s shirt-front than Steve remembered. It was trickling down toward his pants in a sluggish stream. That was queer. There hadn’t been any wound in his chest. It had just been the blood that had splashed there from his mouth.

  Steve bent down. The hair at the back of his neck stirred. There was a wound now in Tony’s chest—a neat, round wound that had cut a neat hole in the starched shirt.

  His hand slightly unsteady, he felt for Tony’s pulse. There was no motion in the cold, limp wrist.

  Steve faced this thing as he had had to face so many other unfaceable things in the past two years.

  Tony Dort was dead.

  Someone had shot him through the heart.

  It was second nature to Steve to do the safe thing at the right moment. Instinctively, without thinking, he went to the door and slipped the locking chain into place. He moved back, staring down at Tony. He wasn’t feeling much of anything. This wasn’t a time to feel.

  His brain coped with the bald facts, precisely one fact after another. At eight, he had left Tony lying unconscious on the floor. Unconscious, not dead, not seriously hurt even. It was just after eight-thirty now. In the past half-hour, Tony had revived. He could tell that because the position of the body had changed.

  In the past half-hour, someone had come in and shot Tony.

  The bar carpet stretched on each side of the corpse with no hiding place. There was no gun visible. That definitely made it murder.

  Steve started to feel a little then. Not for Tony. The vague, cosmic desire which had brought him back had vanished into limbo. He was feeling for himself, because his thoughts were sending out danger signals.

  When you find a body, you call the police. If he called the police, the police would come. They’d ask him to explain himself. He’d say Tony had stolen his wife when he was overseas and that he’d beaten him up. He’d say he’d left him unconscious and gone off to a bar and then come back. Why? For some crazy feeling, half pity, maybe, half shame.

  It was obvious what the police would say about that story.

  He thought of the fingerprints he must have left on Tony’s platinum case when he took a cigarette. He pulled out a khaki handkerchief. Quite steady, he leaned over Tony, slipped the case from his pocket, wiped it and replaced it. He looked around. Shiny surfaces were everywhere—surfaces he might have touched.

  He moved through the room, running the handkerchief carefully over tables, chair backs. He might be removing the murderer’s prints with his own. He knew that and didn’t care.

  He was standing by the fireplace. Something gleamed, half hidden under a chair’s slip cover. During his first visit he had stood exactly in this place when he’d lunged out at Tony. There had been nothing gleaming under the chair then. He was sure.

  A gun, he thought. Maybe there’s a gun and it’s really suicide, after all.

  He stopped and picked up the thing that gleamed. He held it in the palm of his hand. He stared at it.

  The thing in his hand was a compact, a small white gold compact encrusted with emeralds.

  The compact he had given Celia.

  Steve was used to hard knocks. He’d thought he could take them on the chin. But suddenly he was nearer to breaking than he’d ever been in his life.

  Celia’s compact was here, under the chair. It hadn’t been there when he left the apartment for the first time. Celia had been here after he was gone. Celia!

  All the things, to whose loss he’d thought adjusted himself, came rushing back. Waking up in the morning and Celia being there. Celia laughing her sudden, spontaneous laugh at the movies. Celia who had been his wife and who’d walked out on him when he’d been away.

  Celia had murdered Tony!

  Steve made himself say it, and he saw it as something inevitable, like a complication in a Greek play. He saw, too, that he couldn’t hate Celia just by telling himself to hate her, that he couldn’t put the past behind him, write it off.

  Whether he wanted to or not, this was still his problem. Whatever the cost, however barren the gain, he would stand by Celia.

  A cigarette would have helped, but now he was reluctant to take another from Tony’s case. He put the compact in his pocket and started to investigate the room again. This time he took infinitely more pains. Celia was always careless, he remembered. He wiped every surface he had not wiped before. He came to the telephone. Maybe Celia had used the telephone. The handkerchief hovered over the instrument.

  It started to ring.

  III

  Because the danger was Celia’s danger now, Steve was less steady. The stakes were so dizzily high. Let the telephone ring? What if it was someone who had a date with Tony? Someone who knew he was there, who would investigate?

  Steve took the receiver up in his handkerchief. “Hello,” he said in a blurred, neutral voice.

  “Tony?” It was woman’s voice, hard, bad-tempered. “This is Janice. What on earth’s happened to you? I’m coming right around.”

  “Tony’s not here,” said Steve.

  “Not there? Then—what? Who are you anyway?”

  “A friend of Tony’s. He lent the apartment to me for the night.”

  “Where’s Tony then? He was supposed to meet me at Sardo’s for dinner. I’ve been waiting an hour. I’d better come over.”

  “It’s no use. Tony’s been called out of town.”

  “I suppose it’s Virginia acting up again. That woman’s a positive menace. Why doesn’t he divorce her and have done with it?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Steve. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Janice laughed suddenly. “You sound cute. What about pinch-hitting for Tony and buying me a dinner?”

  “Sorry. I’ve got a date.”

  “Okay. Just give Tony hell if you see him before I do.” Eternally Janice rang off.

  Steve put the receiver down, wiping the stand. He’d done the right thing. If he hadn’t answered, that girl would have rushed straight over.

  He turned off the lights. Quietly, he slipped out of the door, locking it and putting the extra key in the pocket of his blouse. He took the stairs down. There
was less chance of being seen.

  There was no one in the vestibule. And there was no one on the street as he emerged from the apartment building and strode along the sidewalk.

  Three blocks farther on, Steve hailed a taxi. His voice sounding unnaturally gruff, he gave the driver Celia’s address. It was the first New York taxi he’d ridden in for three years. The worn upholstery, the little vase with no flowers in it, the muffled radio muttering sports news, made him feel more at home than he’d felt since his arrival at Penn Station. The familiarity of it was bitter, though.

  If life had left him alone, he’d have been in a taxi like this, driving home to Celia as his wife. Not driving home to a woman who had no more use for him, to find out whether she had committed a murder.

  The taxi stopped outside a large apartment house with an opulent red and white striped awning. Steve paid off the driver. The building was new to him. Celia had moved there after he’d left. The newness seemed hostile. So did the silent, uniformed elevator man who took him eighteen flights up. Soon he was standing outside a strange door.

  He wished he wasn’t so afraid of that first moment of seeing her. He couldn’t help her if he was afraid. At last he moved closer and pressed the buzzer.

  The door opened on a girl, slight and very young in white lounging pajamas, with tawny hair loose to her shoulders. She stared at him for a moment. Then she threw her arms around his neck.

  “Steve, darling. It’s you. I can’t believe it.”

  She clung to him. Her warm lips were on his cheek. He could smell the faint fragrance of her hair. He’d been so sure that Celia would open the door that he could not immediately adapt himself. For one instance moment he felt it was Celia—Celia as she used to be.