Night Has a Thousand Eyes

by Cornell Woolrich

  They were nearer success than they had been all evening. The gap of a vacant smile held Reid’s lips fixedly parted, like the crowing grimace of an infant who senses he has just done something extra-commendable in the eyes of his doting elders.

  It had lifted for a moment. He seemed to have forgotten. The champagne, the music, the lovely girl’s high spirits.

  “I want to dance too!” he said suddenly. “I want to dance with my little girl!”

  She gave Shawn a look of triumph, jumped to her feet overjoyed.

  “Now we’ll show them something. These young men are so slow.”

  They began to move slowly, uncertainly about in a tottering little half circle.

  “Like in the old days, darling?” she crooned questioningly close to his ear. “Like in Rome, like in—”

  Shawn, seated at table, started to light a cigarette, face beaming approvingly. Suddenly he stopped, it dropped from his mouth.

  They were in difficulties of some kind. Something had happened. Reid was inert, limp against Jean, and his body starting to trail downward toward the floor, against her attempts to hold him in continued uprightness.

  A heartbroken whisper wrenched itself free above the vivacious, heartless music.

  “Jean, I’m going to die. Going to die—”

  Shawn jumped upright at the table, to help her, and one of the champagne glasses went over.

  Reid had reached his knees now, as if in slow futility, slow succumbing. He was still propped against her, and her eyes were stretched out at full width, holding his transversely.

  There was the semblance of a crucifixion in their agonized posture.

  Shawn saw her lips stir, and knew what they were saying rather than actually heard. “We’ve failed, Tom. We’ve failed. It was all for nothing.”

  On the table the last laggard drop rolled sluggishly across the rim of the downed champagne goblet, and was spent. As impossible to recapture, once it was gone, as life itself.

  14

  Police Procedure:

  Dobbs and Sokolsky

  “SOKOLSKY, LIEUTENANT. SOMETHING CAME, ALL right. Like you said it would. I’m sorry to get you up at this unholy hour—”

  “Never mind that. That’s what I’m for. Cops aren’t supposed to sleep, cops are so other people can sleep. What broke?”

  “The whole thing. Wide open. All apart. It’s like this. About forty minutes ago, around two-thirty, I was asleep on the bed, taking a relief, and Dobbs was at the set. He’d been in bed himself, our pigeon, since around about eleven. We’d heard the bed-springs sound off, and not another sound after that, so we knew. Well, about two-thirty, Dobbs edged over toward me, still keeping the head set on, and nudged me awake. ‘You’d better get in on this,’ he said. ‘Somebody just came in down there—’”

  “Hunh? What’d you say?”

  Dobbs clamped a cautioning hand across his partner’s loose-mumbling mouth, held it a minute.

  “Get on base. He just opened the door. Somebody’s standing there. Somebody’s been knocking at it. Low, but for a long time.”

  Sokolsky adjusted the spare headgear, groped for notebook and pencil. The latter eluded him, fell to the floor with a slight tick. “Watch it, you damn fool,” Dobbs hissed viciously.

  They were both set now, alerted.

  Silence.

  “Must be just staring at each other,” Dobbs mouthed. “Not a word. The door’s open, I heard it creak.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know him.”

  “Then he’d say ‘Who are you?’ Sh! Here it comes.”

  (shorthand transcription, as entered in notebook)

  Shift of feet on uncovered section of flooring. More than one pair. Door closes. Feet blur onto a rug.

  VOICE (not Tompkins): “I want to talk to you.”

  No answer.

  VOICE: “Come on, wake up, will you?”

  TOMPKINS: “Take your hand off me, don’t do that.”

  VOICE: “Then get some wake-up into you.”

  TOMPKINS: “What time is it? Why do you have to come here at this hour?”

  VOICE: “Because I’m not taking any chances, I don’t want to come near you in the daytime.”

  TOMPKINS: “It’s no more safe and no less safe in the daytime than it is now.”

  VOICE: “Whatever you mean by that. And don’t bother explaining.”

  Sound of a chair creaking, as weight is put to it.

  VOICE: “Look, I haven’t very much time. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Are you seeing Reid tomorrow?”

  TOMPKINS: “No.” (slowly) “No, I’m not.” (pause) “I’m never seeing him again. He dies tomorrow night.”

  VOICE: “Yes, you are. Don’t give me that bellywash. Save that for your kitchen-maid audience. We’re talking facts now, not nonsense. Send a message tomorrow that you want to see him. He’ll come flying, like an arrow out of a bow.”

  TOMPKINS: “He won’t come here. He’ll never come here again.”

  VOICE (angrily): “Will you cut out that tripe? You’ve been spouting it so long, you’re almost beginning to believe it yourself. Well, I don’t! Now I’m telling you what you’re going to do, so listen and get it into your head once and for all.” Sound of a match striking. Odor of expensive cigar smoke through floor boards.

  VOICE: “Now I’m doing the talking. You just listen. You send word to him you want to see him tomorrow. Alone. Without the girl. She’s not to know about it. You tell him, when you’ve got him here, that there’s been a change in the—vibrations, constellations, what do you call them?”

  TOMPKINS: “I don’t call them anything.”

  VOICE (arbitrarily): “You tell him there’s been a change for the better. He’s been given a breathing spell. It may still come, but it’s not as positive as before. He has a fighting chance now; it’s become partly a matter of free will once again. It depends on him. He’ll ask what he has to do, he’ll beg you to speak, he’ll tell you he’s willing to do anything; I know that much. You tell him, very indifferently, there are one or two things he could do, to put himself in a more favorable position. There are certain alterations in the will, for instance. Everything goes to the girl, as it stands now. That’s all right, he doesn’t need to change that. But here’s where the change comes in. In case of her death, if she has no children, it’s to go to you, you become the sole heir. Suggest to him that would be a good way for him to show his appreciation to you, if he’s anxious to do so. Point out that it doesn’t take anything from her. And if she marries and has children, of course, it’s canceled out. It’s just in case she dies unmarried and without issue. I don’t think he’ll need much urging. Tomorrow is his last day, and he’d better do it right tomorrow. Explain to him that if your own life line and his are united in that way—and, after all, that’s the only practical way it can be done—the favorable aspects of your own have a far better chance of influencing the unfavorable ones of his. You enter into his house, or something like that; you know the tripe. You’ll be able to deflect the prophecy, maybe even gain him total immunity.”

  TOMPKINS (wearily): “But I can’t. I haven’t the power. It’s not a prophecy. It’s just something that’s there. It’s going to happen.”

  VOICE (furiously): “Will you cut out that crap? What do you think I am? Now I’ve given it to you straight on the line. He’ll do anything you say—right? And you do anything I say, or—”

  TOMPKINS: “I don’t want his money. I could have had any amount of it, long before now. He’s come here to me and pleaded with me to take it. He’s left checks behind; I don’t bother sending them back any more—”

  VOICE: “No, you don’t want his money, you don’t want his checks. Not much. You lifted one of them, though, from five hundred to five thousand dollars, didn’t you? And turned it over to me. I’m holding it right now. With your endorsement on the back of it.”

  TOMPKINS: “You brought liquor here. You gave me drinks. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not used to drinking.
I don’t remember whether I did it or not. I think you did it.”

  VOICE: “You did it right under my very eyes. It’s got your endorsement on it, not mine. And if I put it through, d’you know you’d go to jail for twenty years for doing a thing like that?”

  TOMPKINS: “I’m going to jail anyway. But not because of that check.”

  VOICE: “Are you going to do like I tell you?”

  Long pause.

  TOMPKINS (indifferently):“No.”

  Chair scrapes back violently.

  VOICE: “Now, how about it? Are you?”

  Another long pause.

  TOMPKINS: “Put that away. That can’t hurt me.”

  VOICE: “It can’t, eh? All I’ve got to do is jerk my finger and you’ll see. You fool. You poor mangy flea-bitten fool. You could be a rich man. I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to help us both.”

  TOMPKINS (sadly):“You’re the fool. You poor fool, you. You came here tonight, and you couldn’t do anything different. But you’re not going to get his money, if that’s what you think. You’re not going to live long enough to. Why, you’re going to die even sooner than he is. His time is tomorrow night, yours is right tonight. You’ll never even leave this house alive. On the stairs outside, in a few more minutes—”

  VOICE: “Who’s going to see to it, you?”

  TOMPKINS: “There are two plain-clothes men in the room over us, at this very minute, listening to every word we say—” (Sudden backward heave from Dobbs.)

  TOMPKINS: “I’ve known they were there all along. I couldn’t have stopped you from coming here, I couldn’t have stopped you from saying what you have. What was the good? Their names are Eddie Dobbs and Bill Sokolsky, and they’ve been there for two days—”

  (Dismayed backward topple by Sokolsky, creating a thud on the floor.)

  TOMPKINS: “There. Did you hear that? Now, do you believe me?” (Sudden race of footsteps across the floor.)

  TOMPKINS: “It’s no use. You can’t evade it. You’re going toward it, not away. Death is rushing at you right now, I hear the beat of his swift wings. I feel it, I see it, it’s on its way. You have only seconds left—”

  VOICE (ragingly):“And here’s yours, you dirty double-crossing bastard! For framing me!”

  Revolver shot.

  Door is jarred open, and footsteps stampede wildly down the outside stairs.

  Sokolsky tore the headset off himself, nearly taking his ears with it, flung it at the wall, wrenched his own gun out of the holster slung over the foot of the bed, burst out of the room, around the stairhead, and down.

  There was a man a full flight and a half below him, careening down at top speed. Sokolsky bellowed: “Hold it! Stay where you are!” He stopped short, and sighted at the landing, two down and a half flight below the man. It gave him a patch of opening, where the rest of the stairs were telescoped together.

  The figure came around the turn, and as it did so, fired up at him point-blank. The bullet made a stroke of air past his jawbone, without touching it.

  Sokolsky didn’t move. He held fire, lowered his sights to the landing below, the last one of all, taking a chance on getting him there. It was a tricky trajectory, almost straight downward, just over a little. He clamped his hand to his gun wrist to steady it.

  The figure flickered across the landing turn and Sokolsky’s gun crashed, at one and the same time.

  The figure completed the turn on momentum alone. It took the first three of the next downward steps still upright. Then it went into a long sliding fall. It fell all the rest of the way to the bottom, slid out a considerable distance, as on a skating pond and stopped moving.

  When Sokolsky got there the man was dead.

  Dobbs came down to him a minute later, his face very white and papery-looking, and not because a man had been shot.

  “Who is he?”

  He was around fifty. It had gone right into his brain, from the side. His clothing was good quality. There were no marks of identification on him. It must have been a deliberate precaution, for purposes of this visit. His billfold had money in it, but all papers of a personal nature had been extracted. There was a place where the initials had been stamped in gold, and they had been scraped off. Even the stitched-in canvas identity label had been ripped off the lining of his inside coat pocket.

  “It’ll take time,” Sokolsky said, squatting over him. “Better get up there and—”

  There was a slight sound on the stairs, and he turned his head.

  Tompkins was on them, coming down very slowly. Not stealthily, but so slowly that his descent made hardly any sound. He was already nearly at the bottom.

  Sokolsky straightened slowly to his feet, on the far side of the corpse; grim-faced, gun in hand. Gun that had fired only one shot.

  “You’ve saved us the trouble, Johnny,” he said truculently. He thumbed with the gun point for an indicator. “Get over there by the wall and stand still, until I’m through here.” He turned away, about to resume his inquisitorial crouched posture.

  Dobbs seemed to have come down bare-handed. He was standing there leaning against the opposite wall, across from where Sokolsky had indicated; looking a trifle shaky, as though his nervous system had received a shock from which it hadn’t yet had time to recover.

  Sokolsky suddenly snapped his head around once more to their hostage. He hadn’t stopped as ordered. He’d continued moving forward. As slowly as on the stairs, but forward. Since the corpse, and Sokolsky, were in his way, he moved around one side of them. He even stepped over the corpse’s outstretched feet.

  This was direct violation of a police order, given at gun point. Sokolsky was entitled to shoot him down without another word.

  He stood steel-straight, gun muzzle maybe six inches from the man’s retreating spine.

  “I said get back there!” he bellowed. “Stand aside where I told you or I’ll let you have one! Dobbs, go over there and take him.”

  “I can’t move,” Dobbs whispered strickenly. He seemed to be trying to peel his shoulder off the wall, as though it had adhered to flypaper, and failing. “Even my given name he knew—”

  Tompkins took another slow step away, like a man in pensive withdrawal from a place that no longer holds his interest. The street door was just ahead of him.

  Sokolsky scissored his legs over the corpse, planted one on the outside of it. That brought the gun that much nearer.

  “You’ve had your warning, Jack,” he said, voice vibrant with imminent commission of what he’d threatened. “You take one more step away, and it’ll be your last one on this earth!”

  Tompkins turned his grave face only partially toward him, to address him backward. “You can’t do anything to me with that. It isn’t my time yet.” He took the one more step.

  Sokolsky gave him the break of the dummy shot, that even fugitives in full flight usually get, whether they deserve it or not. He was still so helplessly close to the gun, the detective could hardly have done otherwise.

  He tilted it an inch and fired a warning shot just over the top of his head. It went into the door with a drumlike concussion.

  “Now come backwards,” Sokolsky said wrathfully, “or it’ll not only be your time, it’ll be thirty seconds past it!”

  Tompkins turned, but only to draw a wing of the door open, inward. He was now full-face to the gun, lingering smoke clearing its bore as though it hated to leave.

  Dobbs moaned a little, went a notch lower on his wall-gummed shoulder.

  Tompkins looked at the gun. He wasn’t smiling, wasn’t derisive; there was no expression of bravado on his face. There was, rather, a sort of mild, detached interest, as of a man taking a final glance at some particular object, but an object of no great moment, before he leaves the house to take a walk.

  Then he took his hand off the knob, and turned once more, outward to the open night now, and set one foot across the threshold.

  Sokolsky altered the gun and fired at the back of his knee, just to bring him
down, not to kill him.

  The trigger clacked, and there was no detonation, the shot had misfired. He’d put six bullets in and he’d fired only twice, once on the stairs and once into the door.

  Tompkins’s second leg trailed the first, out past the threshold.

  Crazed, the detective stamped forward after him a single leg span, but a lengthy one, and sighted point-blank at the back of his head. Four feet away; no one could have missed, and he was trained in firearms. It was the death shot, all else having failed, and he was justified.

  The trigger clacked, and it had misfired again. And it had never misfired before in all the time he’d had it.

  Tompkins’s arm came in and around, rearward to his body, and he drew the door wing slowly to after him, to closure.

  Sokolsky pumped the trigger maniacally, twice more, his face twisting like a sopping wet rag with a sort of panic he’d never known before, and twice more that barren tubular click came. And nothing else but a flatter echoing click, as the door latch tongue went back into place.

  Dobbs moaned a little again.

  Sokolsky ripped the door open and staggered out. There was just darkness on the other side, nothing moving, nothing to be seen.

  He worked with the gun, raised it and fired wildly into that darkness, and four times it cracked out in full-bodied explosion, once for every bullet there was in it—now that there was nothing in front of it any more to be hit.

  Then he let it drop to the ground, and leaned soddenly back against the side of the doorway, as if he were all in and couldn’t have moved another inch. And he couldn’t have.

  15

  The Wait:

  Mid-evening

  THEY LOOKED SMALL IN THE middle of the room, the three of them. It should have been a snug box room, to hold so few people, and so close together as they were, and it wasn’t. It was too stately, and too classically proportioned. The ceiling was too high over them, and even the brilliantly lighted chandelier of crystal prisms couldn’t bring it down any closer, seemed rather to accentuate its height. The windows were too tall, and the burgundy damask draperies smothering them, interfolded at full length before them so that not a trace of an opening showed, only emphasized their formal height and width.