“Why’d he have to do that, couldn’t he tell by the hall?” His voice wasn’t as sleepy as before.
“They turn the lights in the upper halls out at eleven-thirty, here, and I guess the hall was dark already—”
His head had left the pillow now. “That’s still no reason why he should bust in on you. I’d like to hear the rest of this.”
“There isn’t any rest, I’ve told you all there is to it.”
“That’s what you think! Watch what I get out of it. To begin with, who was he, had you ever seen him before?”
“Oh, sure,” I smiled deprecatingly. “We weren’t strangers. His name was Burg. He’d been living in the room for a week or ten days before that. We’d said howdy passing each other on the stairs. We’d even stood and chatted down at the street-door several times in the evening, when neither of us had anything to do.”
“How is it you never mentioned this incident to me before, as many times as I’ve asked you to account for every single minute of that evening, before you fell asleep?”
“But this has nothing to do with that, with what—came up later. You’ve kept asking me if I was sure I didn’t remember leaving the room at any time, and things like that. I didn’t even step out into the hall, when he came to the door like that. I was in bed already, and I didn’t even get out of bed to let him in—now what more d’you want?”
“Oh, you were in bed already.”
“I’d been in bed some time past, reading the paper like I do every night. I’d just gotten through and put out my own light a couple minutes before, when I heard this light knock—”
He made an approving pass with his hand. “Tell it just like that. Step by step. Tell it like to a six-year-old kid.” He’d left the chair long ago, was standing over me. I wondered why this trifling thing, this less-than-an-incident, should interest him so.
“I turned over, called out ‘Who is it?’ He answered in a low-pitched voice, ‘Burg, from next-door.’ ”
He wrinkled the skin under his eyes. “Low-pitched? Furtive—? Cagey—?”
I shrugged. “He didn’t want to wake up everyone else on the whole floor, I suppose.”
“Maybe it was that. Go on.”
“I can reach the door from my bed, you know. I stuck out my arm, flipped the key and opened the door. He was standing there in his suspenders, holding this lighted candle in front of him. So he asked if my room-light was okay, we tried it, and it was.”
“Then did he back right out again?”
“Well, not instantly. We put the light right out again, but he stayed on in the doorway a couple minutes.”
“Why’d he have to stand in the doorway a couple minutes once he’d found out your light was okay?”
“Well—uh—winding-up the intrusion, signing-off, whatever you’d want to call it.”
“In just what words?”
Gee, he was worse than a schoolteacher in the third grade. “You know how those things go. He said he was sorry he’d disturbed me, he wouldn’t have if he’d realized I was in bed. He said, ‘You’re tired, aren’t you? I can see you’re tired.’ ”
“With the light out.” It was a commentary, not a question.
“The candle was shining into my face. He said, ‘Yes, you’re tired. You’re very tired.’ And the funny part of it was, I hadn’t been until then, but after he called it to my attention, I noticed he was right, I was.”
“Kind of repetitious, wasn’t he?” he drawled. “You’ve quoted him as saying it four times, already.”
“He kept saying it over and over, I couldn’t even keep track of how many times he said it, and his voice kept getting lower all the time.” I smiled tolerantly. “I guess he’s got kind of a one-track mind, used to mumbling to himself maybe.”
“All right, keep going.”
“There’s no further to go. He closed the door and went away, and I dropped right off to sleep.”
“Wait a minute, hold it right there. Are you sure that door closed after him? Did you see it close? Did you hear it? Or are you just tricking your senses into believing you did, because you figure that’s what must have happened next anyway?”
Was he a hound at getting you mixed-up! “I wasn’t so alert any more, I was sort of relaxed, like I say—” I said baffledly.
“Did it go like this?” He opened it slightly, eased it gently closed. The latch-tongue went click into the socket. “Did it go like this?” He opened it a second time, this time eased it back in place holding the knob fast so the latch-tongue couldn’t connect. Even so, the edge of the door itself gave a little thump as it met the frame.
He waited, said: “I can see by the trouble you’re having giving me a positive answer, that you didn’t hear either of those sounds.”
“But the door must’ve closed,” I protested. “What was he going to do, stay in here all night keeping watch at my bedside? The candle seemed to go out, so he must’ve gone out and left me.”
“The candle seemed to go out. How do you know it wasn’t your eyes that dropped closed and shut it out?” I didn’t say anything. “I want to ask you a few questions,” he said. “What sort of an effect did his voice have on you, especially when he kept saying ‘You’re tired’?”
“Sort of peaceful. I liked it.”
He nodded at that. “Another thing; where did he hold that candle, in respect to himself? Off to one side?”
“No, dead center in front of his own face, so that the flame was between his eyes, almost.”
He nodded again. “Did you stare at the flame pretty steadily?”
“Yeah, I couldn’t tear my eyes off it. You know how a flame in a dark room will get you—”
“And behind it—if he was holding it up like you say—you met his eyes.”
“I guess—I guess I must have. He kept it on a straight line between my eyes and his the whole time.”
He worked his cheek around, like he was chewing a sour apple. “Eyes were fixed and glassy as though he were mentally unbalanced,” I heard him mutter.
“What?”
“I was just remembering something in that deathbed statement Mrs. Fleming made to Waggoner. One more thing: when you chatted with him downstairs at the street-door like you say you did once or twice, what were the topics, can you remember?”
“Oh, a little bit of everything, you know how those things go. At first general things like the weather and baseball and politics. Then later more personal things—you know how you get talking about yourself when you’ve got an interested listener.”
“Getting the feel of your background.” He must have meant that for himself, I couldn’t make any sense out of it. “Did you ever catch yourself doing something you didn’t want to do, while you were in his company?”
“No. Oh wait, yes. One night he had a box of mentholated coughdrops in his pocket. He kept taking them out and offering them to me the whole time we were talking. Gosh, if there’s one thing I hate it’s mentholated coughdrops. I’d say no each time, and then I’d give in and take one anyway. Before I knew it, I’d finished the whole box.”
He eyed me gloomily. “Testing your will-power to see if it was weak enough.”
“You seem to make something out of this whole thing,” I said helplessly. “What is it? Blamed if I can see!”
“Never mind. I don’t want to frighten you right now. You get some sleep, kid. You’re weak after what you tried to do just now.” I saw him pick up his hat.
“Where you going?” I asked. “I thought you said you were staying here tonight?”
“I’m going back to the Fleming house—and to Waggoner’s headquarters too, while I’m at it.”
“Now? You’re going all the way back up there, at this hour of the morning?”
“And Vince,” he added from the doorway, “don’t give up yet. We’ll find a way ou
t somehow—don’t take any more shortcuts.”
* * *
—
It was high noon before I woke up, after all I’d been through, and even then he didn’t show up for another two or three hours yet. I got dressed but I didn’t dare leave my room, even for a cup of coffee; I was afraid if I did I’d miss him, and he’d think I’d changed my mind and lammed out after all.
Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away. Where was there to go, anyway? He was my only salvation—now.
He finally showed up around three, and found me worriedly coursing back and forth in my stocking-feet, holding one bandaged wrist with the opposite hand. Stiffening was setting in, and they hurt plenty.
But I was as fresh as a daisy compared to the shape he was in. He had big black crescents under his eyes from not getting to bed all night, and the first thing he did was sprawl back in the chair he’d originally intended occupying the night before, and kick off his shoes. Then he blew a big breath of relaxation that fanned halfway across the room.
“Were you up there all this time—until now?” I gasped.
“I’ve been back to town once, in-between—to pick up something I needed and get a leave of absence.” He wasn’t sanguine by any means, I could tell that just by looking at him. He didn’t have that steely glint in his eye of your master-detective on the home-stretch to a solution. But he looked less harassed than the night before. Maybe the activity of running around, in itself, was good for him.
He’d brought in a large flat slab wrapped in brown paper with him. He picked it up now, undid it, turning partly away from me, scissored his arms, and then turned back again. He was holding a large portrait-photograph in a leather frame against his chest for me to see. He didn’t say anything, just watched me.
It took a minute for the identity to peer through the contradictory details, trifling as they were. The well-groomed hair, neatly tapered above the ears instead of shaggily unkempt; the clean-shaven upper lip instead of a sloppy walrus-tusk mustache—he helped this effect by holding one finger lengthwise under the picture’s nose—; above all, an intangible aura of prosperity, radiating from the impeccable fit of the custom-tailored suit-collar, the careful negligence of the expensive necktie, the expression of the face itself, instead of the habitual unbuttoned, tieless, slightly soiled shirt-collar, the hangdog aura of middle-age running to seed.
I jolted. “That’s Burg! The man that had the room next to me! Where’s you—?”
“I didn’t have to ask you that, I already know it, from the landlord and one or two of the other roomers here I’ve shown it to.” He reached under it with one hand and suddenly swung out a second panel, attached to the first. It was one of those double-easel arrangements that stand on dressers.
She stared back at me, and like a woman, she was different again. She’d been different on each of the three times. This was the third and last time I was to see her, though this crystallized, arrested glimpse of her preceded the other two in point of time. She had here neither the masklike scowl of hate at bay I had seen by torchlight, nor yet the rigid ghost-grin of death. She was smiling, calm, alive, lovely. I made a whimpering sound.
Somebody, I guess in Waggoner’s office, had stuck a gummed tab uniting the two of them across the division of the folder. Uniting them symbolically in death and mystery. On it was inked: “B-20, 263/Fleming-Ayers/7-21-40.”
“He’s also Dorothy Fleming’s husband, Joel,” Cliff said. “Waggoner gave me this, from their house.”
He must have seen the wan light of hope beginning to flicker in my eyes. He snuffed it out, with a rueful gnaw at his under-lip, a slight shake of his head. That was the kindest way, I guess; not to let it get fully kindled. Hope is so hard to kill, anyway. He closed the photo-folder and threw it aside. “No,” he said, “no, there’s no out in it for you. Look, Vince. D’you want to know now what we’re up against, once and for all? You’ve got to sooner or later, and it isn’t going to be easy to take.”
“You’ve got bad news for me.”
“Pretty bad. But at least it’s better than this weird stuff that you’ve been shadow-boxing with ever since it happened. It’s rational, down-to-earth, something that the mind can grasp. You killed a man that Wednesday night. You may as well get used to the idea. There’s no dodging out of it, no possibility of mistake, no shrugging-off of responsibility. It isn’t alone Mrs. Fleming’s deathbed description, conclusive as that is—and she didn’t make that up out of thin air, you know, imagine someone looking just like you. Fingerprints that Waggoner’s staff took from that mirror-door behind which Ayers’s body was thrust check with yours. I compared them privately while I was up there, from a drinking-glass I took out of this room and had dusted over at our own lab—” I looked, and mine was gone.
“You and nobody but you found your way into the Fleming house and punctured Dan Ayers’s heart with an awl and secreted his body in a closet.”
He saw my face blanch. “Now steady a minute. You didn’t kill Dorothy Fleming. You would have, I guess, but she ran out of the house and down the cut-off for her life. You can’t drive, and she was killed by somebody in a car. Somebody in Ayers’s car, but not Ayers himself obviously, since you had killed him upstairs a minute before yourself. Now that proves, of course, that somebody brought you up there—and was waiting outside for you at a safe distance, a distance great enough to avoid implication, yet near enough to lend a hand when something went wrong and one of the victims seemed on the point of escaping.”
That didn’t help much. That halved my crime, but the half was still as great as the whole. After being told you’d committed one murder, where was the solace in being told you hadn’t committed a dozen others.
I folded over, seated, held my head. “But why didn’t I know I was doing it—?” I groaned anguishedly.
“We can take care of that later,” he said. “I can’t prove what I think it was, right now, and what good is an explanation without proof? And there’s only one way to prove it: show it could have happened the first time by getting it to happen all over again a second time—”
I thought he was going crazy—or I was. “You mean, go back and commit the crime all over again—when they’re both already buried?”
“No, I mean get the circumstances down on record, repeat the special conditions that surrounded it the first time. Even then, it’ll be purely circumstantial and none too good, but it’s about the best we can hope for.”
“But can’t you tell me what—?”
“I think it’s safer if I don’t, until afterwards. You’ll get all tense, keyed-up; you’re liable to jeopardize the whole thing without meaning to, make it miss fire. I want you to keep cool, everything’ll depend on that—”
I wondered what he was going to ask me.
“It’s nearly four o’clock now,” he said. “We haven’t much time. A telegram addressed to Mrs. Fleming was finally received from her husband while I was up there; he’s arriving back from South America today. Waggoner took charge of it, showed it to me. He’s ordered her reburied in a private plot, will probably get there in time for the services—”
I trailed him downstairs to his car, got in beside him limply. “Where we going?” I asked.
He didn’t start the car right away, gave me a half-rueful, half-apologetic look. “Where is the place you would least rather go, of all places, right now?”
That wasn’t hard. “That eight-sided mirrored alcove—where I did it.”
“I was afraid of that. I’m sorry, kid, but that’s the very place you’re going to have to go back to, and stay in alone tonight—if you ever want to get out from under the shadows again. Whaddye say, shall we make the try?”
He still didn’t start the car, gave me lots of time.
I only took four or five minutes, and I gave him the rest of it back. I slapped in my stomach, which made the sick-feeling go up int
o my throat, and I said: “I’m ready.”
* * *
—
I’d been sitting on the floor, outside it, to rest, when I heard him come in. There were other people with him. The silence of the house, tomblike until then, was abruptly shattered by their entrance into the lower hall, their voices, the sounds they made moving about. I couldn’t tell how many of them there were. They went into the living-room, and their voices became less distinct.
I stood up and got ready, but I stayed out awhile longer, to be able to breathe better. I knew I had time yet, he wouldn’t come up right away.
The voices were subdued, as befitted a solemn post-funerary occasion. Every once in awhile, though, I could make out a snatch of something that was said. Once I heard someone ask: “Don’t you want to come over to our place tonight, Joel? You don’t mean you’re going to stay here alone in this empty house after—after such a thing?”
I strained my ears for the answer—a lot depended on it—and I got it. “I’m closer to her here than anywhere else.”
Presently they all came out into the hall again, on their way out, and I could hear goodnights being said. “Try not to think about it too much, Joel. Get some sleep.”
The door closed. A car drove off outside, then a second one. No more voices after that. The tomblike silence almost returned. But not quite. A solitary tread down there, returning from the front door, told that someone had remained. It went into the living-room and I heard the clink of a decanter against a glass. Then a frittering of piano-notes struck at random, the way a person does who has found contentment, is eminently pleased with himself.
Then a light-switch ticked and the tread came out, started unhurriedly up the stairs. It was time to get in. I put one foot behind me, and followed it back. I drew concealment before me in the shape of a mirror-panel, all but the ultimate finger’s breadth of gap, to be able to breathe and watch.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 18
