Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  “I tailed Dr. Schneider to his home. But the more interesting question is what happened to you? And what happened to Dr. Schneider?”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you. But not here. I’m grateful to you for saving my neck, but I don’t have to submit to cross-questioning on a two-foot beam forty feet in the air.”

  “Fifteen feet is a better estimate.”

  “So what? While we sit here chatting, the man who put me here is probably on his way out of the state. Did you ever hear of Peter Schneider?” The ironic rasp I forced into my voice made me cough.

  “The police are after him,” Gordon said. “They’re after you, too.”

  “I thought you were the police.”

  “That’s right. Can you climb down by yourself or do I use the fireman’s lift on you? Or do you want to stay up here and hang yourself some more?”

  I remembered what Peter Schneider had said before I passed out. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that when I came into this barn you were in the act of hanging yourself. The rope around your neck was slung over the rafter, pulled tight, and tied to this heavy loose beam. The beam was then placed on your face so that when you pushed it off it would fall and jerk the rope. The rope would then jerk you off the beam by the neck and either break it immediately or strangle you.”

  “So I suppose you’re going to book me on a charge of attempted suicide.” Watching the fixed snarl on his face, I wouldn’t have put it past him.

  “Don’t be childish, Branch. I told you we’re after Peter Schneider.”

  “Is it childish to ask why he went to all this trouble with ropes and beams? Why didn’t he just give himself the pleasure of hanging me by hand?”

  “He went right back to the farm and told the old lady you had tried to kill him but he got away. The deaf-mutes confirmed the story in writing. She had already phoned the Arbana police about you. Schneider said he was going to get help, and drove away.”

  “I get it,” I said. “If you found my body soon enough, you’d be able to establish that I killed myself after he left. ‘Slayer Suicides after Killing Father and Attempting to Kill Son.’”

  “I’m glad you feel able to joke about it,” Gordon said with a certain nasty primness. “Did you kill Dr. Schneider?”

  “I’ll answer questions on terra firma,” I said. “Go ahead and I’ll follow you down.”

  Gordon went down the ladder like a cat, and I climbed down after him holding on tight. He went to the door and I followed him into the shaft of sunlight that came through it. I saw the shotgun lying in the chaff beside the door and stooped down to pick it up, balancing my head carefully.

  “Drop it,” Gordon said, his hand inside his left lapel.

  I straightened up in surprise. “For Christ’s sake. I paid forty dollars for that gun.”

  “And it looks as if you intended to get your money’s worth,” Gordon said. “It was a trail of blood that led me to this barn. And I notice that you’re not bleeding anywhere.”

  “You’re damn right I used it. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit him. He cut his arm and used the blood as bait for me. Like a sucker, I followed him to the barn and got a noose around my neck.”

  “Stick to rabbits, Branch.” Gordon picked up the shotgun and broke it to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t, and he handed it to me.

  I didn’t like his attitude. “Mr. Gordon,” I said, “I admire the bloodhound instincts which just saved my neck. But now you’re barking up the wrong tree. If you arrest me for murder, I’ll sue you for false arrest.”

  Gordon’s teeth gleamed in the sun as if he was proud of them, but he wasn’t smiling. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Branch,” he said. “And you can start now. Why did you follow Schneider into McKinley Hall this morning?”

  “How do you know I followed him in? Or do you hesitate to reveal the secrets of your fascinating trade?”

  “It’s not your business, but I’ll tell you. After the War Board meeting, I tailed Schneider on the chance that he’d go looking for this evidence you were talking about. He went home in a taxi and his son met him at the door. They had an argument in German and finally the old man gave in. They came out to the green coupe parked on the driveway and drove into Arbana.”

  “All very interesting,” I said. “But all it proves against me is that I was right.”

  Gordon clipped me off. “Not quite. They parked near the campus and the old man got out and crossed the campus to McKinley Hall. I couldn’t follow him in because I had no key, so I stood in the shadow of a tree and watched all the back doors. A few minutes after Schneider went in, you came around from the front of the building and entered by the west door. I want to know why.”

  “I’m not ashamed of my reason,” I said. “I got the idea that Judd had hidden his evidence in the Middle English Dictionary office, and I went to look for it. Old Schneider had the same idea. I found it and Schneider tried to hold me up. I knocked him out. But it’s obvious to me now that I should have let him shoot me.”

  The irony was lost on Gordon. “Did you knock him out with a horseshoe?” he said. “And have you got the evidence you found?”

  “Listen, Gordon,” I said. “I’ll answer questions after you find Peter Schneider, if you still want to ask them. Didn’t you see anybody else enter the building?”

  “Just before I heard the shots I saw a man and a woman go in at the east end. The man looked like Peter Schneider and—”

  “I knew it,” I said. “Peter Schneider and Ruth Esch killed the old man. I left him unconscious on the floor—without a hole in his head—and went down to get the policeman. While I was gone, they killed him and ran away with the envelope.”

  “What envelope?”

  “An oilskin envelope with information about the new A S T Program in it. Judd told me he found it in Schneider’s office. Schneider and his son were both spies, and Peter made off with the evidence.”

  Gordon kept on looking like a stolid redskin. “You say that the two Schneiders were spies working in cahoots, and you also say that Peter killed his father. It doesn’t hang together.”

  “Doesn’t it? Peter couldn’t get his father out of the building. Maybe the old man was weakening and Peter was afraid he’d talk to the police. He had no deep filial affections, I happen to know. And it was a chance to frame me for murder.”

  “You’re good at explanations, Branch. But there’s no evidence.”

  “What happened to Schneider’s bun? He had a Lüger which he tried to use on me. Even if I had killed him, it would have been in self-defense.”

  “So you say. Did you assault a police officer in self-defense?”

  “That was a mistake. I saw I was being framed for a murder and it made me mad. I guess I was a little crazy. Anyway, I thought I had to get away and I got away.”

  “For a while,” Gordon said. “You’d have been better off in jail. Don’t attempt another getaway. I can shoot, and I can run.”

  “And you can swim,” I said. “What a list of accomplishments! Go practise the aquatic art in some convenient lake.”

  “I can also be unpleasant, if necessary.”

  “You’ve convinced me.”

  He snarled silently one last time and jerked his thumb towards the door. I stepped outside into sunshine that hurt my eyes, and he followed me. We left the barn with nothing dangling in it but the rope.

  I felt good about that and about the bright sun on the autumn fields. But I resented his suspicion and the crack about being better off in jail. It implied that all my bones were sore for nothing.

  As we started across the field, where Peter had pretended to stagger and fall, I said, “If I had spent the night in jail I wouldn’t have found out who killed Alec Judd.”

  “So you know that, too” Gordon said.

  “I know that Ruth Esch left McKinley Hall about a quarter to twelve last night.”

  “Twenty minutes before Judd was killed, according to your own story.”
>
  I said with heavy irony, “No doubt delayed-action murder sounds fantastic to the literal ear of the law, but I recently acted as guinea pig in a little experiment intended to prove its feasibility.”

  Gordon turned to me with a glint in his sombre eyes. “You’ve got something there, Branch. I’ll have to examine that room.”

  “There’s another possibility, too,” I said. “At least it may not be an impossibility. The receiver of the telephone in Judd’s office was hanging down when I went up there after he fell, and it seems he put in a phone call shortly before.”

  “He did? Who to?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to find out from the university operator, but she wouldn’t tell me what she had heard. She probably told Sergeant Haggerty—I know he was talking

  “I’ll ask him,” Gordon said. “Who is Ruth Esch?”

  “A German woman who just came to this country. Peter Schneider’s fiancée.”

  “Red-headed?”

  “And green eyes. About thirty.”

  “Is that the woman the taxi driver saw at the bootlegger’s?”

  “Shiny? Yes. Did Shiny tell you?”

  “He recognized this woman as the passenger he had driven downtown just before midnight. She recognized him, too, and left the bootlegger’s immediately. That’s suspicious in itself.”

  “Where did she go when she left the bootlegger’s? Peter was alone when he caught up with me at the farm.”

  “She hasn’t been seen since,” Gordon said. “Two drunks left at the same time, according to the taxi driver, and maybe she went with them. They haven’t been found, either.”

  We passed the white boulder stained with Schneider’s blood. The stain was darker now. I remembered my exultation when I first saw it, and felt humiliated. Better stick to rabbits, Branch, half my mind said; but the other half said, you’ll get them yet.

  We climbed the rail fence where Schneider had taken cover and entered the maple woods. It was pleasant to walk between the two levels of color, on the trees and on the ground, and have nothing around my neck. Not even skin.

  Even Gordon was taking on some of the attributes of a human being. I said to him, “May I assume that you are beginning to be willing to toy with the hypothesis that I am not a murderer?”

  His smile was so much like a sneer that it left me guessing. “If you’re innocent you have nothing to fear.” He added heavily as if he was by Jehovah out of the goddess of justice, “The law exists for the protection of the innocent and the apprehension of the guilty.”

  He couldn’t even be friendly without riling me. “Don’t be so impartial,” I said. “I pay my income tax, and I haven’t killed anybody yet. Why didn’t you follow those two into McKinley Hall when you saw them, and apprehend the guilty and protect the innocent?”

  “They had a key and I hadn’t. I should have jimmied the door sooner, but I didn’t do it until after I heard the shots. By the time I got in they were gone. I still don’t know how they got out.”

  “I do,” I said smugly. “They got out through the steam-tunnel the same way I did. I met them later in the museum and we exchanged a few well-chosen shots.” I said nothing about seeing him in the basement of McKinley Hall. He wouldn’t have liked it.

  “Have you any further information?” Gordon said. “It will be best for you if you tell me everything you know.”

  “Nothing I can think of at the moment. Except that somebody is hitting me over the head with a hammer.”

  “Your humor is excessively tinny this morning.” I couldn’t argue.

  “I need breakfast.”

  We emerged from the maple woods and crossed the pasture. I had chased Peter Schneider farther than I thought at the time, and I began to wonder how Gordon had got to the barn when he did.

  “How did you happen to get here in the nick of time? Or is that just an old Federal Bureau of Investigation custom?”

  “I’m glad you feel happy enough to joke about it,” Gordon said.

  “After all, it was my own personal lynching party,” I said. “But it was pleasant to have you drop in. I’ll never resent the withholding tax again.”

  “They don’t deduct it in jail,” he said, and I felt less chipper. He went on:

  “I was at the Slipper with Haggerty when the taxi driver came tearing down the road, and we drove over to the bootlegger’s right away. Haggerty had a police car with a radio and when the old woman phoned the Arbana police about you, they got in touch with Haggerty at the bootlegger’s and I came over here with a couple of policemen. After a fairly lengthy correspondence with the deaf-mutes, I got the idea that you might be over there in the woods, so I went over. I finally worked over into the field and found the trail of blood, and that led me to the barn.”

  “I’m glad Schneider cut his arm,” I said. “But it should have been his throat.”

  We passed under the willow trees and around the corner of the barn. There was a long black sedan parked at the gate.

  “Is that the police car?” I asked.

  “No, it’s mine. I sent the police after Schneider.”

  He opened the gate and said: “I want to phone. They may have caught him.”

  The old woman came out of the front door of the farmhouse. She took one look at me and yelled to Gordon:

  “That’s the man! Don’t let him get away!”

  I have many of the aspects of a gentleman. I wear sixty-five-dollar suits. I am a member of the Modern Language Association. I speak pure English, at least in the lecture-room. I am generally chivalrous in my attitude to women. But I raised my right hand, pressed the thumb to my nose, and wiggled the fingers. The old woman groaned righteously and raised her eyes to heaven.

  Gordon frowned at me. “Sit in the car, Branch. I trust you won’t try to run away again.”

  I said I wouldn’t. I put the shotgun in the back seat and climbed into the front. Gordon followed the old woman into the house. I noticed he hadn’t left the ignition key in the car.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the driver’s mirror. There was chaff in my hair, my nose and cheeks were scraped, and I needed a shave. But what interested me most was my eyes. The pressure of the rope had broken some of the small vessels and suffused my eyeballs with blood. I looked like a pulp-magazine illustration of a homicidal sex-fiend whom any jury would convict on appearance alone.

  I moved out of range of those horrible glaring eyes and saw that there were radio-dials on the dashboard. I turned on the radio in the hope of getting some news. My hope was not disappointed.

  After listening to several numbers on a program of prewar recordings, I got an early news broadcast from Detroit. The Allies were advancing in Italy and the Russians were advancing in Russia, as usual.

  “News of the state,” the announcer said breathlessly as if Atropos was standing at his shoulder. He was wrong, she was standing at mine.

  The staccato words crashed into my consciousness like machinegun bullets: “Arbana: In the early hours of this morning, a member of the faculty of Midwestern University was murdered, allegedly by a colleague on the university staff. The victim was Dr. Herman Schneider, well-known refugee from the Nazis and head of the German Department at the university. Professor Robert Branch of the English Department, who quarreled publicly with the murdered man earlier in the evening, is now being sought for questioning by police.

  “Hearing the sound of gunshots from McKinley Hall, the main building of the university, shortly after 3 A.M. this morning, Constable Sale of the Arbana police force rushed into the building and apprehended Professor Branch, who was running downstairs from one of the upper floors. In an office on the fourth floor the officer discovered the body of Dr. Schneider, his skull smashed by a blow on the head from a horseshoe paperweight.

  “Shortly after this discovery, Professor Branch overpowered the police officer and made his escape through the steam-tunnels underneath the campus. He is now being sought by local and state police and by the F.B.I., who expect furth
er developments within a few hours. Detectives report that there is possibly a connection between the brutal murder of Dr. Schneider and the death earlier in the evening, apparently by suicide, of Professor Alexander Judd, chairman of the War Board of the university. The president of the university, Dr. Galloway, could not be reached for comment. Lansing …”

  The announcer went on to something else and I switched off the radio. I sat perfectly still for a minute, numbed by shock. Then the panic that had driven me through the tunnels and across the fields came back and walloped me in the stomach. I flung open the door and jumped out of the car, ready to run.

  Gordon came out of the farmhouse and walked across the lawn watching me alertly. I saw his long legs and remembered his shoulder-holster. I said, “I wonder if I could get a drink of water.”

  He went to the dairy and brought me a brimming dipper. I emptied it and felt better, but my stomach was knotted and my knees were weak.

  “Did they get him?”

  “Not yet,” he said as he got into the driver’s seat. “They’re still after him. He went around Arbana on the back roads and apparently headed for Detroit.”

  He started the engine and I got in beside him. He turned up the road in the direction of the barn where the barn-dance had been.

  I felt irrational resentment against Gordon. He hadn’t let me know how serious my situation was. He had saved me from one noose, only to lead me into another. Then I remembered the serious warnings I had laughed off. I had been so glad to get out of the frying-pan that I didn’t believe in the fire. Probably I should be grateful to him for not putting handcuffs on me.

  We passed the barn and the dancers were gone and the fiddler had stopped playing.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To the bootlegger’s.”

  “The whisperer?”

  “Yes. I’m going to trace the two drunks who left when Ruth Esch did.”

  “What if you don’t catch them? Do I stand the chance of being convicted of Schneider’s murder?”

  Gordon avoided a direct answer. “We’ll catch them. Every policeman in the state will be on the lookout for them. And I’m going to telegraph their descriptions to every police station in the Middle West.”