by Gorman, Ed
I walked down the hall, being careful not to soil the soles of my shoes on any of the unknown substances that spotted it or any of the vermin that roamed the shadows. When I got to Dane’s door, I asked what was going on.
“I heard a gunshot,” Tony Lomax said.
Tony was a short little gink with curly black hair, dark eyes, and five o’clock shadow that showed up by noon on the days he bothered to shave. His specialty was gimp detectives, but he also did mob stories, cop stories, and powder-burning Westerns.
“I heard it, too,” Stan Burke said. He had a light, clear tenor, and on a good night in a bar, he’d sing “Danny Boy” sweet enough to put a tear in your eye. “A roscoe snarled in Ron’s room. Maybe he shot himself.”
Burke was a rail of man. He looked like Ichabod Crane on a bread-and-water diet, but his long, thin fingers could knock out a story in one sitting, usually a story about some guy fighting giant snakes on Venus or asteroids exploding or some other kind of ray-gun stuff.
Also, he wasn’t above stealing from Bellem, at least in conversation.
“Like hell he shot himself,” said Al Roberts.
Of the four of us, Roberts was the one who made the most money. He had three regular series in the detective pulps, two or three in the Western pulps, and the love pulps bought everything he could turn out, which was a lot. So Al ate a little better than we did, and it showed.
“He just sold a story to Black Mask,” Roberts went on, “and Shaw said he’d take more. Would you kill yourself if you were selling to Cap Shaw?”
The answer to that for all of us was, hell, no.
“So what now?” Lomax said. “Break down the door?”
“You tried the knob?” I said.
Lomax nodded. “Locked. I tried it, and then I knocked. No answer.”
“He’s in there, though,” Burke said. “I heard his typewriter when I went to the phone a while back.”
A pay phone in an alcove at the end of the hall was the only one on the floor. None of us could afford a phone line, or if we could, we didn’t want one.
“A locked room mystery,” Roberts said. “Who writes those?” Nobody admitted it.
“Move out of the way,” Roberts said.
We did. Roberts moved up, took hold of the door knob, drew back to arm’s length, and threw his beefy shoulder against the door. It popped right open. The Regis Arms didn’t put a lot of money into buying sturdy bolts.
Roberts went into the room, and we all followed. I could smell gunpowder as soon as I got inside.
The light wasn’t on, but Thane’s typing desk was set up near the room’s only window. Thane had fallen forward onto the desk, his head resting in a small pool of blood beside the Royal upright typewriter. One arm hooked over the typewriter as if protecting the sheet of paper he’d been typing on. The other arm dangled limp, the fingers near the gun that rested on the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Burke said, crossing himself. I hadn’t thought of him as being religious. “He did shoot himself.”
I walked over to the desk, careful not to touch anything. Several pulps were scattered beside the typewriter: Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Weird Tales. I thought that was odd since Thane, like me, wrote mostly for the crime and Western pulps. Maybe he was thinking about breaking into a new market. Not what I’d be thinking about if I’d just sold to Black Mask, but Thane wasn’t me.
He wasn’t anybody now.
“Jesus Christ,” Burke said again, and I turned to see why. Burke was looking out the window, as were Roberts and Lomax. I stared over their shoulders.
Standing in the twilight on the roof of the building next door, one floor below us, was a man. Not just any man, either. He was dressed all in black, including his slouch hat and mask. And his cape.
It definitely wasn’t Jesus Christ.
“It’s The Spider,” Lomax said.
“Or The Shadow,” Roberts said.
I didn’t say anything. The man in black gave us an ironic salute, swirled his cape, and ran across the rooftop. He clambered over the low ledge on the other side and disappeared.
“Somebody better call the cops,” Lomax said.
“I will,” I said.
Two
Detective McCoy, in spite of his name, wasn’t Irish, or not recently. He was pure New York, from his beady little eyes right down to the tops of his worn-out shoes.
He questioned me in my room, and I could tell he didn’t believe a word of what I told him, not after he got a sniff of my breath. I wouldn’t have believed me, either, even though the others must have told him essentially the same thing.
One problem was that the window was locked. From the inside.
“So there was a guy on the roof next door, all decked out like one of your crazy pulp heroes, and your pal was locked in the room, dead.”
I lit a Camel, sucked in some smoke, and said, “Sounds a little funny, but that’s the way it happened.”
McCoy stuck out a hand. I tapped a Camel out of the pack, and he took it. I lit it for him.
“Want me to smoke it for you, too?” I said.
He didn’t crack a smile. “You writers are all nuts,” he said, brushing smoke away from his eyes with one hand. “Or liars. Maybe lying for a living’s affected your brains. If you got any.”
“You don’t read?”
“Don’t have time, and if I did, I wouldn’t waste it on that crap you turn out.”
I knew I wasn’t any Hemingway, but I couldn’t let that pass. “We don’t write crap, McCoy. You might not like it, and the highbrows might not like it, but there are plenty of guys who do. They plunkdown their money, and they get something that takes their minds off their troubles for a while. That might not seem like much to you, but it’s a lot to them.”
“So you think you’re Shakespeare, so what?”
“I don’t even think I’m Dash Hammett, but I write the best I can, every story, every line, every time. Nobody ever feels cheated by one of my stories. They’re mine, and I’m proud of them. All the others would tell you the same. What we do means something to us.”
I crushed my cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray on my desk. McCoy did the same. I didn’t offer him another.
“Yeah,” he said, “you’re all proud of what you do, and I bet you’re extra proud of that yarn about the man in the cape. The one that disappeared without a trace.”
“That’s not a story. That’s the truth.”
“Bull corn. What happened is this. Your friend shot himself. Simple as that. Maybe he wasn’t selling anything, maybe he had love troubles, maybe anything at all. Case closed.”
McCoy wanted it simple. In and out, no work for him, no suspects to chase, all neatly tied up in a swell little package. I wasn’t going to let him off the hook, not yet.
“He was selling plenty,” I said. “He didn’t have any love troubles because he didn’t go out. And there was a man on the roof.”
“So you say. You find him, maybe I’ll talk to him. But you won’t find him, because he was never there. Suicide, that’s what we have here.”
“No note.”
I’d looked at the page in Thane’s typewriter. It wasn’t a suicide note. It was a story of some kind.
“Not everybody who decides to take that way out leaves a note,” McCoy said.
“Thane would have. He’s a writer. That’s what he did. He couldn’t have resisted writing something if he’d planned to kill himself.”
“Yeah, right. And the Spider was hanging out on the roof next door.”
“Might have been the Shadow,” I said.
McCoy just stared at me. “The door was locked, the window was locked. Nobody came in or out. Not even your masked man.”
He had a point, I suppose. I asked if our conversation was over.
He nodded. “Damn right. And don’t bother me again with stories about little men dressed in black.”
McCoy left. I stared at the paper in my own typewriter. I needed to finish
the story I’d been working on, but I couldn’t concentrate on it, now with what had happened. Somehow a make-believe gun moll didn’t interest me at the moment. I lit another Camel, smoked it down as far as I could without burning my fingers, then mashed it out. I had a few sips of my cheap bourbon, thought things over a little longer, then went down to Thane’s room.
They’d already carted Thane off to the morgue, and the door was closed. Getting inside was no problem, however, since Roberts had broken the lock and the Regis Arms wasn’t going to repair it until the room was rented again, if then. I slipped into the room and closed the door behind me.
The first thing I did after turning on the light was to look out the window. I don’t know what I thought I’d see, but if I’d been expecting a masked man, I’d have been disappointed. It was getting late now, and the moonlight gave a white glow to the empty roof. I stood there a minute, watching, but nobody showed up. I hadn’t expected anyone to.
I went to the typewriter. The paper had been removed, but it lay on the desk. I read what Thane had typed.
• • •
The dame was no good. She had a heart as cold as a banker’s smile and a mouth as cruel as a cobra’s. I didn’t care. I pulled her to me and crushed her against me. I could feel the softness of her breasts, the beating of her heart.
“You’re good, baby,” I said. “You’re really good.”
“No, I’m not,” she breathed. “I’m bad clean through.”
“That’s what I mean,” I said.
• • •
Deathless prose, all right, and nothing about suicide in it. If there was a clue, I couldn’t seeit. What writer would kill himself in the middle of a story? Not me, not Thane. They’d put a bag over Thane’s hand, but I didn’t think they’d even try a paraffin test, not if McCoy could prevent it, and I was sure he could.
I looked at the magazines by the typewriter. I still couldn’t figure out what they were doing there, but maybe Thane didn’t like to read the same kind of stuff he wrote.
Most writers I knew did read occasionally. They liked to read, which is why they became writers inthe first place. Then they found out that writing took up more and more of their time, and they didn’t read much any more. But everybody found time to read something now and then.
I picked up the magazines and took them back to my room. Then I sat down and started to read. I don’t know what I was looking for, maybe something that would explain how a guy standing on a rooftop could have gotten inside a locked room and killed a man.
I didn’t find anything like that, of course.
But I did find something else.
Three
It was cold out on the roof. I could hear the cars in the street grinding along. There weren’tmanyof them, and the noise was muted by the wind that swirled down the alley between the buildings and brought up the stink of garbage.
I walked over to where the man in the cape had stood. There was no sign of him, but then I hadn’t thought there would be. McCoy might not have believed us about the man, but he’d sent a couple of uniforms to check, just to be sure he was right about us being nuts, or liars, or both. I didn’t think the uniforms would have checked everywhere, though, and I didn’t think they’d have been too careful.
I’d looked all along the stairway on the way to the roof, but I hadn’t found a thing. The closet that held the doorway onto the roof had been bare as well.
On the other side of the room was a fire escape. The man in the cape had gone down it after saluting us, I was sure, so I swung over the ledge and clattered down the iron steps. When I hit the bottom, the counterweight swung me down into the alley. An overflowing wooden trash bin sat in heavy shadow against the wall opposite me when I stepped off.
A man wearing a mask, a cape, and a slouch hat in the early evening would be conspicuous even in New York, even near the university. Me, I’d have ditched part of the outfit before going out on the street, and I’dhave bet my last check from Dime Detective that the cops hadn’t thought of that.
So I went over and pawed through the trash. I jerked back my hand a time or two when it touched somethingwet and slimy I couldn’t identify, but before long I grabbed hold of a thin piece of cloth and pulled it out. It was the mask, no doubt about that, and after another couple of grabs, I came up with the cape. I didn’t find the hat. Maybe the guy had thought it was fashionable and kept it on. He was wrong, but nobody would pay much attention to ahat, and it would disguise his appearance.
It seemed to me that the mask and cape had been too easy to find, though. If I’d been the man who’d worn them, I’d have been more careful about where I’d but them, or I’d at least have hidden them deeper in the garbage.
I folded the mask and cape, tucked them under my arm, and went back to the Regis Arms.
• • •
There were six rooms on the hallway we writers lived on. I was on the end nearest the stairs, and Al Roberts lived opposite me. Roberts lived next door. Then came Lomax down at the end. The room opposite mine was empty. Some university prof, the kind who didn’t mingle with writers, had moved out a couple of days earlier, probably to much better quarters. Thane lived, or had lived, next door, and Burke lived in the last room on that side. Roberts was the one I wanted to talk to, but first I stopped by my own room for one of the magazines that had been on Thane’s desk. I took it with me and went next door.
If anybody was harder on typewriters than I am, Roberts was the one. I’ve mentioned that he was big, and he treated his typewriters like punching bags. He broke one down every five or six months and bought another one. Not a new one. He always bought his machines at pawnshops, his theory being that if he was going to tear them up so soon, he might as well get the cheapest ones he could find.
I stood outside the door and listened for a couple of seconds. He was giving the typewriter a real workout. All of us worked well into the night, most days, and I could hear him talking as he typed. That was a peculiarity of his. He’d talk to the typewriter, to his characters, to himself. He wasn’t shy about it, either.
“Give it to him, sister,” his muffled voice said. “Don’t let him get away with making you look small. Atta girl! Slap him again!”
I knocked on the door.
“Come in!”
I opened the door. Roberts was at his desk, his thick fingers a blur as they danced over the clackety keys.
“What is it?” he said.
“Don’t you ever lock your door?”
“Why the hell should I? I don’t have anything worth stealing.”
Good point.
“I’ve been thinking about Thane,” I said.
“Yeah? Why? Don’t you have any work to do?”
All the time he talked, Roberts’ fingers kept moving. He could write and talk at the same time, a talent I lacked.
“I was wondering who killed him,” I said.
“Didn’t you talk to McCoy? Suicide, pure and simple.”
“What about that man we saw?”
“We didn’t see anybody. McCoy told me so.”
The clickety-clack of the keys was starting to annoy me. I walked over and tossed the cape and mask on top of Roberts’ Royal, stalling the keys.
“What the hell?” he said, and gave me a look. At least he’d stopped typing.
“Take a gander,” I said.
He did, turning the cloth in his hands, and then he shook his head. “I’ll be damned. Where’d you find ’em?”
“In the trash in the alley.”
“That would explain the stains.”
I wiped my hand on my pants without being conscious of why I was doing it.
“McCoy’s not much for police work,” Roberts continued. “The cops I write about do a better job.”
“Except for the bent ones,” I said.
“Yeah, except for those. He fingered the mask. “Pretty cheap material. What’re you gonna do about it?”
“Nothing at the moment.”
He pitche
d the mask down, and I handed him the magazine I’d picked up in my room.
“Amazing Stories?” he said. “I don’t read this stuff. Nice cover, though.”
I was fond of women in metal bathing suits, myself.
“Ever write any of it?” I said.
“Never tried.”
“What about Thane?”
“Nope. He hadn’t written any that he ever mentioned to me.”
“Then what was he doing with those magazines?”
Roberts clearly hadn’t thought about that. Now he took a couple of seconds to consider it.
“Seems to me he picked them up last week. He mentioned something about trying his hand at something different.”
That had been my first thought. You couldn’t blame a guy for wanting more markets, even if he’d just sold to Black Mask.
“Did he say anything else about it?”
“Don’t remember. He might have mentioned that he’d come across something interesting, but he didn’t say what it was. It didn’t seem important at the time.” He looked at me. “Still doesn’t.”
“It might be more important than you think,” I said. “Take a look at the story on page thirty-two and see.”
Roberts flipped the pages, the stopped. “‘The Cult of the Eagle People’?”
“That’s the one.”
“By Jack MacLane? Whose he?”
I told him I didn’t have any idea. He laid the magazine on his desk and put his finger on the line drawing that illustrated the tale.
“People with eagles’ heads?”
I shrugged. “Either that or eagles with people’s bodies.”
“And why the hell would I be interested in a piece of crap like that?”
“Just read a little of it and see,” I told him.
He groused some more, but he gave it up after a second or two started reading. I smoked a Camel and waited.
After a couple of minutes, he said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Four
“Does the story seem familiar?” I said.
“Damn right, it seems familiar. I wrote it.”
“You did, huh?”
