by Jerry eBooks
So they left it alone. They didn’t know what a man could learn on a battlefield. They didn’t know what a man could do with another’s blood on his hands.
It was worse after the searchers left. Much worse. Because then he could think, he could remember, all those loud, vengeful voices:
“That girl called him Terry. Find out what soldier she knows by the name of Terry, and plaster his pictures in all the papers. We’ll find him, someone will turn him in.”
“The Munsen guy’s going to live. The doc says the knife just grazed his ribs, so it’s only one murder we’ve got against this Terry.”
“You can hang as high for one as you can for two.”
“What ever made the dope do it?”
“There was something about a silver teapot being stolen.”
“Hell, no, that damn fool woman found it where she left it, on the Notions counter.”
Words. Beating through the silence. Pounding on a man’s brain. Words tumbling in a kaleidoscope of horror, and always coming back the same, “You can hang a man as high for one, as two.”
Terry Grey lay there, hour after hour, until it was night. He saw the windows at the far end of the stockroom grow grey, then black and white again when the movie across the street lighted its twinkling sign.
That’s where he ought to be, out there at the movies with Saucy. Only he was in here, going crazy, wondering why he had killed a man he didn’t know, and only tried to kill the man he hated. Perhaps hate wasn’t the word, perhaps contempt would be better. Contempt and fear that somehow Pat might get Saucy away from him. Two years was a long time to remember a guy you didn’t see.
Only she had seen him, with blood on his hands.
Terry Grey buried his face in his arms. And he kept rubbing his hands on the ball of excelsior he’d picked off the floor. The blood was gone from his fingers long ago, but he could still feel it.
Pretty soon he’d have to surrender to the police. It was the only thing he could do. He’d thought it all over here alone with himself in the dark. There would be no more peace for him, not ever again. Not with Mr. Lighman’s scream growing louder and louder in his ears.
Terry wondered which scream it was, this one echoing over and over. Was it that first scream when Terry began falling, or was it another scream when Mr. Lighman died? That was the odd part. Terry couldn’t remember, he couldn’t remember using the knife and he thought he ought to. It wasn’t easy pushing a knife in and out of a human body. He knew. That was how he got the damn dagger in the beginning, only that was war and this was murder.
If only he could prove he hadn’t done it! He didn’t care about the rest of the world. He just wanted to prove it to himself, and to Saucy Fields.
Terry Grey climbed down from his high roost; soft as a cat he hunted for the stockroom door. He’d have to be careful, there’d be a watchman, somewhere about there’d be an old man with a flashlight and keys and a gun. That was a chance Terry had to take. He had to get to the hall again and look at those stairs. He wanted to see what a man could do in four minutes of time.
Terry had a couple of books of matches in his pockets. They helped find the door, they also showed him the place where the candles were stored, long ones and short ones, altar candles and table candles and birthday candles. He chose an altar candle in a red glass jar, because that way there’d be no drip. There also was very little light. Just a halo about his hand, and all that dark, silent store crowding down about him.
The clock said twenty after eleven. Terry looked at it close to be sure, then ran down the stairs as fast, as softly as he could. He stood there in the dark at the bottom and lit the candle again. The blood was brown now. The jagged holes in the door black.
He cut at the air, over and over he slashed with the knife that wasn’t in his hand. Then he ran back up the stairs, careful to keep on the soft, padded part of them. He held the candle close to the white-faced clock, twenty-three minutes past eleven. So there had been time. Someone could have come down, killed, and gone back up again. It would have been possible, but it would have been so close. Too close.
How could anyone on the spur of the moment discover that dagger and use it to such advantage! It couldn’t be. Minds didn’t work that fast. Besides there was no motive. It had to be Terry Grey. He leaned low over the candle and his shadow was a giant touching him on the shoulder. The first cut had been an accident, slicing into Mr. Lighman as Terry fell, and the rest madness. Terry had drawn blood. With the smell of it in his nostrils he had gone crazy, like a wild animal in the jungle. That was the way it must have been. There was nothing left except to say good-by to Saucy Fields.
He tried all the doors. The first was the girls’ cloak room, the second the kitchens, and the third was the office, a large windowless room with several desks in it, a wired cage, and an old-fashioned safe. There was a telephone on the desk beside the safe, and a telephone book.
The voice at the Y was young, impersonal until he asked for Miss Fields. It hesitated for just a minute. “Who’s calling?”
Terry knew there was danger here. He could feel it coming over the wire, the guarded way the girl spoke, that long moment when she hadn’t spoken at all. “I said, who’s calling?”
“Tell her it’s an old friend of her father’s. A Mr. Beanie.” Beanie was a dog Terry had owned once in the long ago when he was a little boy and Saucy a little girl. Saucy would remember, she had cried as hard as Terry the day old Beanie died.
“Hello, Mr. Beanie?” She was breathless. Her voice was so soft and warm, it was something a man could dream of, as he had dreamed of it for two years.
“Hello, Saucy, I want to say good-by.”
“But you can’t! You’ve only just come.”
“I know. It’s terrible, because things will never again be the same.”
That was when she forgot herself. “No, Terry! They say you killed him, but I know you didn’t. You couldn’t have!”
“I don’t know, Saucy. I don’t know!”
“But I do. You see, I love you.”
For a moment he thought they’d been cut off, then he knew she was waiting. He could hear little sounds, tiny, moaning sounds like maybe she was crying.
“Thank you, honey, but love isn’t enough. You saw the blood on my hands. It was my knife.”
“But you didn’t take the money. It couldn’t be that there were two separate deliveries going on there that day. That would be stretching coincidence too far. The murder must have been because of the robbery. Pat had his back to the landing while he fastened the bolt on the door. Mr. Lighman was the only one who really saw the robber. He was killed and Pat only stunned.
“The police have it all figured out, only they say it’s you who took the ten thousand dollars. How could you? You’d never been there before. You couldn’t have known that the safe was open and no one was in the office. You wouldn’t even have known where the office was.”
“Wait a minute, Saucy! Wait a minute!” He was whispering now. He could hear his heart beating in the earphone. “Tell that to me again. What ten thousand are you talking of?”
“Why the ten thousand dollars that was in the safe at noon today and wasn’t at two o’clock.”
Terry whistled. There was no sound but there were the puckered lips and the air swishing. It blew the candle out. Terry swore. He had used up one book of matches. Where in hell was the other? He found it in his left hip pocket, dumped it, along with a handful of papers, on the desk. The match burned down to his fingers. He lit another and another. Still he stared.
Those papers he had taken out of his pocket. They were brown, little, slim circular bands with numbers on the top of each. $1000.00. He picked them up, one by one. Close over the desk like he was, he could smell them. Perfume.
They were the sweetest sight, this was the sweetest smell in all the world to him. This smell of murder.
There was just the slightest of sounds, a whoosh and an infinitesimal squeek. Terry whirled to see the d
oor groove shut. There was a little man in front of it, a little man with a very big gun.
“Saucy!” Terry shouted, because there was so little time, and no more need for silence. “Were you near the door in the stockroom? Could you see, did anyone come in just before you went out and met me on the landing?”
“No, Terry, no one came in and no one went in the locker room. There was a whole bunch of girls in there waiting for the two o’clock bell. No one went in the kitchen. No one went into the office or they would have been there still, because there’s only one way out of the office, back onto the landing and down the stairs with the people watching through the holes the fire axe cut. Don’t you see, that’s why the police are so sure it’s you, that’s why you must hide!”
“Listen, Saucy, listen and don’t ever forget. If I should die in the next few minutes,” he looked at that gun coming closer and closer, “if I should never see you again, you can know I didn’t kill Mr. Lighman. I wasn’t sure before, I thought I might have done it when I was out of my head, because you see I’ve been trained to kill. The government has spent months, day after day, it has been pounded into my soul. Kill or be killed.
“Yes, I’ve been taught to kill. But I’ve never been trained to steal. Conscious or unconscious, I wouldn’t steal. Yet there are money bands in my pocket, empty money bands. I’ve been framed, Saucy, and it’s wonderful. I know now I didn’t kill Mr. Lighman. That ten thousand dollars has given me back my honor. The fright is gone, Saucy, and the fight is just beginning.”
Terry Grey grabbed hold of the telephone cord, swung the earphone in a sudden, vicious arc and conked the little gent on the top of his head. It was sudden. It caught the watchman quite unprepared, quite before he could press his finger down on that shiny trigger. He dropped his gun, his lantern, and the keys and crumpled up on top of them. Terry hid the unconscious old gent behind one of the desks, then sat down in a swivel chair facing the door.
The police would be there any minute, because of course they had been listening on the phone. They wouldn’t be so dumb as not to tap Saucy’s wire. They’d trace the call to the dime store.
The cops came noisily. First there were the sirens loud enough to make a deaf man scream. Then there was the efficiency, orders here, orders there. At the last, two cops coming up the stairs toward the light. They had guns, and so had Terry Grey.
“Hello.” He smiled. “You took rather longer to get here than I thought.”
“What’s the idea, Grey? Who do you think you are? Put that toy pistol down before you get hurt.”
“It isn’t a toy, and I won’t be the only one to get hurt. If you look, you’ll see a sharpshooter’s medal on my chest.”
“So what? We’re two and you’re one. The store’s lousy with cops.”
“All looking for ten thousand dollars. Suppose I tell you where it probably is?”
“Probably!” It was a sneer. “As if you didn’t know!”
“I don’t, I’m only guessing now.” He held out his left sleeve, showed those four cushioned bars. “Look, that’s two years overseas. Don’t you think it ought to give me a chance to be heard?”
The police chief hesitated. He leaned close and looked deep into Terry Grey’s steady eyes. There was no blinking, no wavering and no fear. The captain holstered his gun, sat on the edge of the desk.
“O. K. We’ll listen.”
“Perhaps first you’d better smell.” Terry took out the brown paper bands with their printing, with their faint, sweet trace of perfume.
The store opened at nine as usual. Only instead of early business being slow, women thronged the store, buying this and that, but mostly passing the door with its jagged holes. They could even see the blood under the edge of it. It was something to savor and go home and talk about. And to read the morning paper again, where it showed Terry Grey being taken into custody by the police.
There was a picture of Saucy, and a picture of the woman of the teapot, and a picture of poor Mr. Lighman. There was also a picture of the ten paper bands from the money that was stolen. The money hadn’t been found yet, but the paper said it would be. The police know sure enough how to make a man talk.
The clerks in the store were pretty much upset. First there was Saucy who hadn’t stayed away like she ought, but came to brazen it out. Then there was Mr. Munsen looking weaker and thinner than ever and walking extra slow. Whenever anyone spoke to him he smiled:
“Well, the show must go on. Mr. Lighman would want it that way.”
But mostly Mr. Munsen sat in Mr. Lighman’s chair. You could see he didn’t feel too good. It was five after four when he closed the safe in the office and said good-by to the girls over their books.
“I guess I’ll call it quits. This wound in my side bothers me more than I thought it would.”
He walked out the door slowly. The girls shook their heads as they heard him go miserably down the stairs. Twice on the way down he stopped and turned. When he got to the bottom he stopped again. Only now he didn’t look so tired, and there was a screwdriver in his hand.
Quickly he peered through the jagged door, he looked up at the empty landing. Then he flicked the screwdriver under the edge of the carpeting on the first step. It came up quite easily. Underneath were a lot of pretty green bills. He gathered them quickly, stuffed them into his coat pocket. When the last came up, there was some fresh sawdust under it. A small square of the bare wood step fell out. It wasn’t such a big hole, yet there was room enough for the gun poking through and a pair of black, remorseless eyes.
“O. K., Munsen, you can put your hands up now.”
Pat Munsen whirled out the door just as a police whistle shrilled. Just as the janitor’s supply closet door under the stairs opened, and out stepped the police captain and Terry Grey.
Munsen tried to run, but there was no place to go. Plainclothes men materialized out of the crowd, hemming him in, a thick black circle of men with guns.
Terry shook his head. “You had already stolen it, hadn’t you, Pat? You were on your way out with your hat and your gloves and your coat. Only that woman made a fuss about her teapot, and I came along with my knife, and Mr. Lighman said he was going to the safe for his gun. You couldn’t have him go to the safe, could you? Not with all that money still on you. Not with me there so handy to take the blame. So you killed him.”
Terry laughed, bitterly, sadly. “That could have been enough, only you had to be so sure to blame it on me so you planted the money bands in my pocket. If you hadn’t, even I wouldn’t have known whether I killed him or not. Those bands were in your pocket when the teapot lady threw perfume all over your vest. Remember? It was the perfume smell that persuaded the police to give me a break. They pretended to arrest me, to give you your chance. All day we’ve waited for you to come for your money.”
“But how could you know? I hammered the nails back so well with the handle of the dagger. No one could know!”
“How could we help but know? There had only been four minutes. One of those minutes I had been falling downstairs. One of those minutes I had been crawling upstairs. The two in between were too busy for you to go anywhere. It takes time to kill a man, then lie down in his blood and stick the knife in your own side. The last took courage. It’s too bad you didn’t have the judgment to use it in better fields.
“We knew you had no time. We knew the hospital attaches found no money on you, so we looked for a hiding place close at hand. What better thing for your purpose than the cushioned stair treads? The first step on your way to the chair.”
MURDER IN SMALL PACKAGES
William Rough
Good-hearted Benny Kerr only wanted to hand that mislaid meat parcel back to its loser. But when it turned out that the package contained an axe-maniac’s tidbit, it was the murder-mad chopper that wanted to make Benny the red-handed receiver.
WHEN the newspaper truck pulled up and the late afternoon editions thudded on the pavement beside Gimpy’s stand, Benny Kerr got up from hi
s park bench and started over. He’d read the latest on the torso murders, get a bowl of chili, and take in the double feature at the Bijou.
Benny admired Gimpy’s quickness, as the lame little newsdealer slashed the ropes on the bundle of papers and whisked headlines into view. During the past couple months, since the tool factory reconverted and he’d been laid off, Benny had come to the park every day and watched Gimpy work. Benny had seen the steady business Gimpy did in papers and magazines. He’d got to thinking that when there were plenty of cigarettes, gum, and candy again, Gimpy would be needing a helper. Benny meant to get that job. It might not pay as much, buck for buck, as working in the stockroom at the factory, but there’d be no layoffs.
Benny fished for a nickel, saw a big shot grab a paper from Gimpy, sit down, and turn to the stock market page. Benny eyed the black-eyed, black-mustached man cannily. Chances were the guy would be finished with the paper in a second.
Benny waited, bright hazel eyes studying the headlines: Second Paper-wrapped Torso Found in Warehouse!
They were the same headlines as in the earlier editions, but Benny swallowed. Because when it happens close to home, that’s what you do—you swallow.
Smaller type said, Victim identified as Teresa Famette, employee of Acme Tool Co.
Benny shivered. Because when it happens to someone you know, you do that too—you shiver.
Tessie Famette, the second victim, had worked in the offices at the tool company and had often brought inter-department memos to the stockroom to give Benny. So had Rosa Scalise, the girl whose dismembered body had turned up first, about ten days ago.
The papers said the killer was a maniac who prowled the tenement district where Tessie and Rosa had lived. Yet he must be an inconspicuous man, for no one had actually seen him drop one of the paper-wrapped parcels that had turned up in sewers, in refuse cans, in subway stations and movie houses.
Benny Kerr blew his nose, winced at the swift pain in his nasal passages. Benny sniffled just as much now, in August, as in midwinter. Doc Kunz was, treating him with some sort of medicine the doc had patented, but it didn’t seem to help much.
