Murder Knocks Twice

by Susanna Calkins

  “You get back to serving, then. Me and him, we’re gonna have a little chat.”

  Jack grinned and put his hand on his hip so that his jacket opened up, revealing a sleek gray handgun tucked neatly in its black leather holster. “You don’t want to mess with me,” he said to Gooch.

  “Gina,” Gooch said out of the corner of his mouth, “move it.”

  Hearing the command in his voice, Gina stepped hastily away, bumping directly into Roark.

  They both watched as Gooch wrapped Jack’s arm neatly around his back, and propelled him up the stairs. Out of nowhere, Little Johnny materialized and helped usher Jack out.

  The few guests who had noticed the confrontation turned back to dancing and sipping their bright-colored drinks. Just another night at the Third Door.

  “What was that about?” Roark asked, his mouth close to Gina’s ear.

  “People think I’m easy pickings. Gotta learn that I’m not.”

  Gina moved away then, heading back to pick up some drink orders from Billy Bottles. She didn’t know if Roark was watching her, but when she looked around again, he was gone.

  CHAPTER 14

  Trying to keep the chill morning air from entering the house, Gina peeked out onto the porch to see if the milk had been delivered yet. Sure enough, two full bottles of milk were waiting, along with something else that had been covered by an old gray blanket. Pulling on her coat, she stepped out onto the porch in her slippered feet and pulled off the blanket.

  “What in the world?” she said, staring down in surprise.

  The object turned out to be a radio. But not just any radio—the one that had been stolen from their home a few days earlier. Crouching down beside it, she traced the familiar scratches along its oak surface before turning it this way and that. It appeared to be intact. There was no note or anything to indicate who had taken it—or more oddly, why it had been returned.

  Standing on the porch steps, she peered up and down the street, on the off chance the person who had left it for them might still be lurking about. But the street was still in the last sleepy stages of dawn, where only the deliverymen were out and about.

  Trying not to feel ungrateful, Gina lugged the radio back into its customary position in the living room. It seemed perfectly fine when she plugged it in, and after tuning the dials, the sounds of the Monday morning exercise show filled the room. “Breathe in, breathe out,” the host said. “Now march in place…”

  Hearing the health drills, her father appeared in the living room, wearing his tattered blue robe. “Where’d that come from?” he asked.

  “Oh, Papa, can you believe it? Someone gave us our radio back!” She beamed, thinking he would be happy.

  “That’s all great and good,” he said, “but who was the scoundrel who took it in the first place?”

  Gina just shook het head. It was all very odd indeed.

  * * *

  Gina mounted the stairs to Marty’s flat, holding a small tin of biscuits she’d made earlier. She was still pondering the mystery of the radio as she rounded the second-floor landing. As before, the elderly lady opened the crack of the door and peered out, not saying a word. “Good morning,” Gina called, but the woman just shut the door. Am I going to be getting a visit from Policewoman Doyle now? She wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  Roark hadn’t gotten there yet, so she let herself into 3A, taking a few minutes to straighten some of the shelves. She spent a little bit of time poking through Marty’s drawers, trying to see if there was anything that might shed some insight into his life—or death. Marty appeared to have been a fairly solitary person. Here and there were some odd art deco knickknacks, mostly sad-looking porcelain clowns. After a first cursory glance through every drawer, she began to look more slowly through his clothes, discovering that he kept them folded and carefully maintained. Since Marty and her father were of different sizes, she thought maybe she’d take the clothes to Hull House, to be distributed among the needy.

  When Roark arrived a little while later, she felt a bit self-conscious as she led him into Marty’s darkroom flat across the corridor. “Here’s my camera,” she said, handing Roark the Kodak, hoping to skip over any awkward chitchat.

  He looked at it, turning it over in his hands. “Had this a while?” he asked, running his finger along the worn surface. He seemed surprised.

  “I bought it used,” she replied, carefully not adding that she’d acquired it just a few days before. She didn’t want to give him any reason to connect her purchase of the camera with Marty’s missing one. “I wanted to start my dad on a hobby, and this seemed as good a time as any to do so.”

  “So you said.” He handed it back to her.

  Gina gestured to the kitchen area that Marty had converted to the darkroom. “This way.”

  Roark nodded. “Yes, I know.” He opened the door. “Come on, then.”

  Gina followed him into the darkroom and watched as he looked through the cabinets. “Good, good,” he muttered, rubbing his hands together. Like the other time she had been there, the room was cold. “At least Marty kept the place well stocked.”

  Without saying anything more, he began to move about busily, setting up several long, shallow pans next to one another, pulling down the three large jugs marked A, B, and C. She stepped back to give him space, but they were still very close together. After he filled one of the pans with water, he opened one of the jugs and poured a strong-smelling chemical into the pan. Gina wrinkled her nose, and her eyes teared up a bit.

  “All right,” he said, turning back to her. “Most importantly, you can’t let any light touch this film. You understand?”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “First, you need to wind up the film like this.” He mimicked a winding movement.

  “Yeah, Benny showed me that already.”

  After she wound up the film, he continued. “Before I turn off the lights, I’ll explain the steps. First I’m going to crack open the case that holds the film, and I’m going to cut off one end of the film and then the other with these scissors.” He pointed to a shiny pair of shears on the darkroom table. “Then we’ll be able to load the film onto the reel. You need to make sure you handle the edges as little as possible.”

  He picked up the reel. “Then we snake the film through the reel so that we’ll be able to wind it up onto the reel. After that, we’ll be able to turn on a little light.”

  “All that without the lights on?”

  “Yes, of course.” His tone was matter-of-fact, not condescending.

  Gina relaxed. He did seem to know what he was doing, and she needed to learn everything she could from him. Eye on the prize, she could almost hear her papa saying. She didn’t realize she had clenched her hands into fists until Roark looked at her.

  “What on earth are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Let’s get going.”

  “If you say so,” he said, flicking off the lights, plunging the room into darkness.

  Gina sucked in her breath. She’d never been in a room so dark. She couldn’t even see her hand in front of her face and could only sense Roark’s presence, in a way that made her unexpectedly nervous.

  “Are you all right?” He sounded a bit impatient. “Not afraid of the dark, are you?”

  “No. So first we crack open the case to remove the film, right?” Her words sounded overly loud. She began to feel around on the table in front of her, nearly knocking it off the table.

  “Easy, bearcat,” he said. She felt him take her hand and guide it to the opener. “Place it there. Yes, that’s right. Now, when I say to, you’re going to crack it open—”

  Before he was through speaking, Gina had already done it. “Now we cut off the ends of the film with the scissors, right?” She picked up the scissors. “Better step away.”

  After carefully snipping both edges, she picked up the reel and tried to thread the film as he had described earlier.

  “Make sure you only touch the edges,” he rem
inded her. “Otherwise you’ll ruin the film before we start.”

  “I get it,” she muttered. Carefully she felt the reel, trying to find a way to thread the end. It was proving more difficult than she expected, and after several tries, she heard him chuckle.

  “How about you let me help you?” Again he reached for her hands and very carefully turned the reel. “See, you can feel the threads here,” he said. “Now gently tuck the end inside … that’s right. Now you can wrap the rest of the film around it. Careful, careful.”

  Holding her breath, she rolled up the film. He was still very close to her, so that her shoulder was very nearly in his chest. “Not bad for your first time,” he said. It sounded like he was smiling.

  “I’m capable, remember?”

  “I remember. Now we put the reel inside this container and add the developer. We have to swish it around for a few minutes—let me set the timer—and then we dump it down the drain. You have to be careful not to do this too hard … yes, that’s right. You’ve got it.” He took a step back. “You changed your perfume.”

  Startled, she almost stopped swirling, but then stubbornly didn’t reply. There was something intimate—searching, even—in his tone, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it.

  “It smells like lilacs,” he mused. Then, growing more businesslike, he continued, “All right, now we add the stop bath—this keeps the negative from continuing to develop. We swish around some more, for another minute.” When that was done, it was time to rinse the film off in water. He flipped the lights back on. “All done.” He took the strip of twelve negatives from her. She could see images on it. Carefully he shook the strip free of excess water.

  “Good news,” he said, holding the strip up. “There are some images on here. You didn’t ruin the film.”

  A thrill of victory soared through her, and she darted closer to look.

  “Nope, no peeking,” he said, taking a clip from the table. He affixed the strip of negatives to the line. “They need to dry first, and we hang them from the line over the sink like so. Then we can use the enlarger and make some prints.”

  “How long will it take for them to dry?”

  “Oh, a few hours,” he replied. “Can I take you somewhere for breakfast?”

  She looked doubtfully at her unfashionable old dress, feeling decidedly frumpy. “How about I make some coffee in Marty’s flat? I’ve also got some biscuits.”

  “All right, then.”

  They went over to Marty’s kitchen in the other flat, and Gina found a plate for the biscuits while the water boiled for the coffee. “I haven’t got any cream. Or butter for the biscuits. I think there’s sugar in the tin.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve had worse. Soldier, remember?” Roark wandered around looking at Marty’s photographs, only returning when the coffee was ready.

  She continued to ask him some questions about film: what it meant to be overexposed and underexposed, how a flash worked exactly, how much light was needed for different kinds of pictures.

  Finally, after he had explained some things, he held up his hands with a slight grin. “I’ll be right back,” he said, picking up the key she had left by the door on his way out. She heard him unlock the door to the other flat. In a moment, he came back with some negatives that Marty had already created, along with a newspaper that had been left behind. “If there’s not very much detail and a lot of shadow, then the pictures were underexposed in the development process,” he explained. “If the images were overly bright, then they were overexposed.” He held the strip of negatives to the light. “Here’s a trick. Try holding a newspaper up behind these negatives, like this. If you can read the paper, then that means the negatives were overexposed.”

  “I see.” Then she thought about how Marty had recorded his prints in his notebook by describing their content. “Isn’t it possible to write directly on a negative, before the film has been exposed? To record a date or location, or something else you’d want to remember.”

  “Yeah, Kodak makes a thing they call an autographic camera,” he replied. “I don’t like it, though. It can mess up the film before it’s even out of the camera. Purely for amateurs.” He took a bite of the biscuit. She half expected him to grimace as he had after he had the fizzy soda, but instead he ate it, licking his fingers. “Delicious,” he said, appearing lost in thought.

  An odd contentment stole over her then, as she contemplated his unshaven jaw out of the corner of her eye. It had been a long time since she had sat with a man in such casual intimacy. In the past, her fiancé would stop by their flat for a quick meal, but he tended to converse more with her papa about the Cubs or whatever else was important to him on any given day.

  Watching him reach for a second biscuit, she idly wondered if his wife baked.

  At the thought, though, she drew herself up with a start. Did his wife even know that Roark was here? Spending time with another woman, alone in her flat? “Let’s finish this tomorrow,” she said, her sudden feelings of guilt making her tone harsher than she intended.

  He looked slightly confused. “I thought you wanted to learn how to make prints. They should be almost dry now.”

  “Oh, I have other things I need to do,” she said, not meeting his eye.

  He glanced down at his watch. It was almost ten thirty. “Yes, I suppose so.” He stood up and placed his cup and saucer by the sink, a surprising courteous gesture. His tone was cool when he turned back to her. “How about I come back tomorrow? Then we’ll create the prints from the negatives. It won’t take too long. No more than two hours, before we hang them up to dry. Then you’ll have learned everything I can teach you.”

  Now feeling guilty about her abrupt dismissal, Gina tried to press more biscuits on him. He waved them off, as well as her thanks, and walked quickly out the door, as if he couldn’t bear to be there even another minute.

  * * *

  Around four the next day, she returned to Marty’s flat to find Roark waiting by the door, impatient to get started on the next stage of the printing process.

  “All right,” he said, examining the negatives. “First we clean them with a little rubbing alcohol. Then we carefully cut them into three strips of four.” He pushed the scissors toward her, and she did as he instructed.

  He pointed to a large piece of equipment. “This is called the enlarger. We use this to start the enlarging process. This is where we transfer the negatives to photographic paper, which is how we make the prints.”

  Laying out three pans, he filled one with developer, one with the stop bath, and the other with water. Each pan had a pair of tongs in front of it. “This time we can work in red light,” he said, pulling a chain and turning on the single red light hanging from the ceiling. With some relief, she could see him fairly clearly.

  Picking up the first strip of negatives, he placed it in the enlarger. “See, we place a sheet of photographic paper here, look through here, alter the aperture as needed for the right amount of light—let’s start with the smallest amount of light, because I can see these were taken outside,” he pointed to a dial on the side, “and focus using these buttons to ensure that the image is sharp and clear. Then we set the timer when we’re ready and all the image to be projected onto the paper where it will be captured. Usually about thirty seconds. We’ll do a test first.”

  He took the sheet of photographic film and slid it carefully into the first pan of developer. Immediately an image of Gina’s upstairs neighbor, which she had taken when she first got the camera, started to emerge. “We agitate it carefully, in a rolling motion, like this—be careful not to splash. Just don’t get any of the developer into the other pans or it will mess everything up.” He set the timer. “We have to do this for a minute, and then we move it to the stop bath with the tongs.”

  When the time was up, he slid the developed image into the stop bath. “This will take a few minutes,” he said. “You can start enlarging the second image now, as I showed you.”

  Gina be
gan to look through the enlarger at the second negative, an image of Mrs. Hayford’s dog.

  “So,” Roark said casually, “you got this camera for your papa, did you?”

  She thought a touch of honesty would ease the lie. “Yes, he hasn’t been well. I thought photography might be an interesting hobby for him.”

  “Are you planning to set up your own darkroom for him, then? Or are you planning to stay here?”

  “I haven’t decided. I may not have many options. The Signora says they’ll be hiring another photographer at some point. I don’t need to move his things out right away.”

  “Interesting.” He moved the first photograph to the bath of water. “Now we’ll leave this here for a while.” He watched as she carefully put the second photograph into the developer and began to agitate it. “Your father took these recently, I take it?”

  “Yes,” she said, lying easily.

  They continued in silence for a while. Roark had filled a second pan with water, so eventually all of the prints ended up getting rinsed off at once. “Now we hang them on the drying line.”

  As they hung up the prints on the same line where they had hung the negatives earlier, Gina quietly gloated over the images, delighted by how well a few of them turned out. She’d taken some around her neighborhood, and some down at Navy Pier, focusing on boats on the water, seagulls, and the grand building at the eastern end of the pier.

  Standing beside her, he said, “Your father has quite an eye.”

  Though pleased, she tried to suppress her smile. “Thanks. I’ll let him know.”

  “Just to remind you, it’s pretty easy to ruin film without the proper equipment.”

  “I understand.”

  “So if you have another roll of film that you want to develop, you need to be really careful.”

  “I understand,” she said again.

  “Just so you do,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “You’d better get ready for your shift. It’s almost six o’clock.”

  After he left, she locked the darkroom door and entered 3A, carrying the bag of clothes she’d brought with her. Even though no one was there, she stepped into Marty’s bedroom to change into her customary dress and fix her hair. As she moved around, the key she’d been wearing caught on a tiny neck hair, reminding her of it’s presence and that she still hadn’t seen anything in Marty’s flats that it might unlock.