“Read Street?” I blurted out incautiously. “But they weren’t there long enough—”
“What d’you mean they weren’t there long enough?” he said with glib impassivity.
“There was a fire, the very first night after they’d moved in. The building at 295 burned down and—” I clamped my jaws shut too late, felt like biting off my tongue.
He didn’t do anything for a minute. There was silence. Then he turned and looked at the others like he had before. With the same quirk to his eyebrows. As if to say, “See?”
But there wasn’t a smile on any of them, him included. He turned back to me.
“You’ve told us who you are out of your own mouth,” he said with soft ferocity. “If you weren’t Lee Nugent how would you know the street and the very house-number you lived at as a kid? How could you know there was such a fire, in which your mother and sister lost their lives, but in which you were saved—for me, here, today?”
He got up and came over to me. He gave me the back of his hand across my mouth, back and forth, three, four, five times. It sounds light, the back of a hand; it wasn’t. He had a heavy ring on it. It opened my lip the second time, it widened the split on the back-swing. It chipped the enamel from my front teeth the time after. By the time he quit there were thin strings of red running down criss-cross all over my chin.
“Take him outside,” he said, “and put on your best hats, we’re all going to a funeral.”
They put me in the back again, one on each side of me. He sat in front, next to the driver. He rode turned halfway around in the seat, facing me over the back of it, so that he could gloat all the way.
People have been taken for rides before. I kept telling myself that; it was all I had. They died at the end of it, and then it was over. It only took a few minutes. All right, they were going to show me my own grave at the cemetery, readied years beforehand, he’d told me just now as we got in. Then they’d make me climb down into it, most likely, and then they’d shoot me. People had died in worse ways than that.
“You think you’re going to be stretched out in it dead, don’t you?” he smiled. “My father was buried alive. That’s what that jail amounted to. We’ll do as much for you. We’ve got a length of copper tubing, with a little nozzle. D’you get what I mean? You’ll last for hours, maybe days. He lasted years!”
He all but licked his lips. If he didn’t that was the expression in his eyes as he watched me. Then something the driver did took his attention off me for a moment. He turned his head around forward. “No, you should have taken the other one, Chris. This won’t get you anywhere.” He was indulgent about it, though. I was his only hate in the world. He could forgive anyone else anything, tonight. “Back up to the intersection we just crossed and turn right into Hallowell Avenue, that’s the shortest way out there.”
“Sorry, chief,” the driver mumbled, crestfallen. “I thought this one was just as good.” He went into reverse. “Wasn’t watching.”
“Naw, this is Pokanoke Street, this won’t take us anywhere. It just runs on for a while and then quits cold. You’d only have to shuttle back over again when you got to the end of it—”
* * *
—
The name sank in, the funny name, like a pebble thrown into a dark pool, and went plunging downward through layers of memory. Pokanoke Street, Pokanoke Street. That name, there was something I had to remember—No there wasn’t, it didn’t matter, what was the difference? I was going to be dead in a little while, what good would a street-name do me?
There was a moment or two of awkward maneuvering, while he guided the car backward, erasing the slight error of direction he’d made. I suppose he thought it was simpler than making a complete loop around and facing the other way, only to have to reverse a second time a few moments later for the new start. There wasn’t anything behind us in a straight line, his mirror showed him that, but as our rear backed out into the open past the corner-line, a light-weight truck came at us from the transverse direction without any warning.
The two things happened at once. The plunging pebble struck bottom in the pool of my memory, and the truck side-swiped the back of the car, shunted it out of the way, and sent it lashing around in a long shuddering skid against the pull of its own brakes, that momentarily threatened to overturn it.
Limpy. A helping hand, waiting down there along that street. Refuge if I could only get to it. Sanctuary. It’s true he was only a lame peddler, but he had a door that would let me in, and close them out. The only friendly door in the whole length and breadth of the town—
There were four of them around me in the car. And only one—the driver—without a gun either already in his hands or within such short reach of his hands that it amounted to the same thing.
But the odds had suddenly evened out in my favor. For, while the car rocked from side to side and threatened to topple from one instant to the next, they were all afraid of dying, death was all they had time to think of. I’d been afraid of dying all along, long before they were, so I was ready for it, and now life was all I could think of.
I freed the gun from the hand of the man next to me on my right. His grip had become so nerveless that I didn’t even have to wrench it from him. I just plucked it from his loose fingers. That meant I had it by the bore and that was the way I wanted it, it saved me the trouble of reversing it. I hitched it against the ceiling and chopped down backhand into the middle of his forehead with it, square between the two eyebrow-bulges. Then I freed the door on that side and made a circular hop out past his relaxing knees. The car hadn’t even finished its burning skid yet. They were all still suspended between two worlds.
Ed Donnelly turned just in time to see me go, then reversed to try to get me on that side. “Hold onto him!” I gave him the gun-butt the flat way, across his teeth. He got his hands on it blindly, as though he were a glutton cramming something into his own mouth. I let it go. His whole head was shell-shocked, he couldn’t use it.
By the time the first shot came, I was already sprinting up Pokanoke Street. It was a soft, spongy sound I didn’t recognize for a shot. It was like a soggy paper bag crunching open. Silencer. I swerved in closer to the building-line and kept hurtling along.
410. 410, he’d said. 410 alone was life, and every other doorway spelled death. Their badges, their phony tin badges would open them, pull me out again.
The crunching sound came again, further behind me now.
The doorways kept ticking off, like uprights of a black picket-fence, I was going so fast. Most were dark. I flashed past one with a dim light behind its grubby fanlight. 395. I was on the wrong side, but it was right over there, just a few doors ahead.
* * *
—
I had to get over. I didn’t slacken, but I launched myself out on a diagonal, away from the sheltering building-line, and that was when they got me. They got me halfway over; I guess I showed better against the empty middle of the street. It made me miss a step, but then I went right on as though nothing had happened, got to the shelter of the building-line on that side.
It was like the prickling of a needle first. That was all, nothing more. Then a sharper pain bored its way in more slowly, as though an awl was being rotated in its wake. Then came heat, as though the awl were generating friction. Then fire, then agony, then approaching collapse. I could feel it coming on up above first, while my legs still seemed good.
400. 402. They were coming now. Something had held them up, they hadn’t been able to start right out after me. Most likely the truck that had participated in the collision had halted a short distance off around the corner and its occupants got out to parley for a minute. They’d been held there against their wills a minute or two, until they could get rid of them, even though one had ventured the muffled potshots in the meantime that had gained their object. Now the running splatter of their feet
suddenly surged out after me in the silence up there.
I had to get in off the street. I couldn’t make another doorway. I couldn’t get there. This was only 406, still three houses away, but this was as far as I could go. I fell twice, once outside the threshold and once inside. The feet were coming nearer. I picked myself up and zig-zagged back to where some stairs began.
I pulled the steps down toward me with my hands, got up them that way, scrambling on all fours like somebody going up a treadmill. I got to the first landing, reared upright, fell again, clawed up another flight of steps.
They got there. They made a blunder outside the door that gained me another flight, a third. They went on past, one doorway too many. I could hear them arguing. “No, it’s this one back here, I tell you! I seen him!”
The fourth flight. Once I stopped entirely, my arms and legs just went dead like a toiling insect, but then whatever it was ironed out, and I went right on again. I wondered why they built houses so high.
They’d doubled back now, and come in after me, down below. I could tell by the hollow tone their bated voices took as soon as they were in out of the open. “This is it. See the blood-spots across the doorway?”
And then an order from Donnelly, in a husky undertone: “You two stay out there, me and Chris’ll go in after him. Bring the car down this way and keep it running. Keep your eyes on all these doors along here, he may try to cross over the roofs and come out one of the others—”
I could hear every word, through the silence, up there where I was. And they could hear me, wrenching at the last barrier of all, the roof-door that ended the stairs, warped and half-unmanageable, but held only by a rusted hook and eye on the inside.
I was out now, in the dark, stars over me, gravel squashing away from under my feet. I kept going blindly, in the same direction as down below in the street. A low brick division-rampart, only ankle-high, came up. That meant 408 was beginning. I had to keep count, or I’d go too far. I couldn’t raise my feet that high any more, to step over it. I had to kneel on it and let myself fall over to the other side.
* * *
—
I stumbled on. Those stars were acting funny, they kept blurring and swirling, like pin-wheels. Another brick partition came up. I crawled over that full-length, like an eel. This was 410 now. This was safety, down under my feet somewhere. Only his door, his was the only one was any good against that tin badge.
I got down the first flight, inside, on my own feet, although sometimes they were too far behind and sometimes they were too far out in front of me. But the next one I couldn’t make standing up any more. I fell all the way down. Not head-first, but in a sort of diagonal slide on my back. And then I just lay flat.
There was a door just inches beyond my numb, outstretched arm lying along the floor. I couldn’t move those few inches. I couldn’t reach it.
I heard another one open, somewhere behind me, as though the sound of my sliding fall just now had attracted someone’s attention. Feet moved toward me and stood there before my glazing eyes. Someone’s arms dug under me, and I was hoisted up, propped against the wall. My blurred vision cleared for a moment, and Limpy’s face came through. It blotted, then came into right focus.
“They’re coming down after me,” I breathed hoarsely. “From up there. And there are others waiting down below outside the door. I haven’t any place to go but here—”
I reached out and caught him weakly by the shoulder. “Limpy, it’s me, don’t you know me, can’t you see my face? What’re you standing waiting for like that? Take me inside with you, close the door. Don’t you want to save me?”
They were opening the roof-door. He still didn’t move. But he spoke at last.
“Would you?” he said. “Would you if you were me? You see, I happen to be—the real Lee Nugent.”
* * *
—
My first day out of the hospital, I came along a pathway in the park. It could have been any pathway, they were all alike to me and I had nowhere to go, but it happened to be that particular one. I slumped down on a bench.
I sat there thinking over what had happened that night. How he’d hauled my half-conscious form inside with him at the last minute, after they were already clattering down the stairs; barred the door and shoved things up against it to hold them off for awhile. “Sure, I’m Lee Nugent,” I’d heard him say softly, “but you’re still my friend.”
I suppose they would have gotten us there, in the end, though—the two of us together, the real and the fake, instead of just me alone. There was no telephone, no weapon, not even an outside window through which to call for help.
But those truck-drivers who had been in the collision earlier with the death-car hadn’t been as gullible as they had appeared to be. They went straight to the police from there, reported a car from which a man had been seen to break away, followed by suspicious flashes that might have been silenced shots, and gave its license number. The cops closed in in turn around them, and jumped them just as the door was splintering under their vicious assault, caught them pretty, the whole lot of them. The two who had stayed behind were picked up later. Donnelly and one other guy had been shot dead in the fracas.
And that was about all. Except, and this came weeks later, I was free to leave the hospital whenever I was in condition to go. Lee Nugent, the real Lee Nugent, didn’t want me held, was willing to drop all charges against me. He felt I’d been punished enough already for my week of stolen high life, and if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been able to come into unhampered enjoyment of the money himself.
So here I was back where I’d started, slumped on a bench in the park, staring meditatively down at the ground before me. I heard a car brake in the driveway out front, and footsteps approached.
I stared at the expensive custom-made shoes and then on up to his face. He was smiling. “They told me you’d checked out when I tried to find you at the hospital just now. I’ve been looking for you. Don’t take offense now, but there’s something that I want to do, I won’t be happy until it’s off my mind. I’m a firm believer in completing the circle of events, ending things where they began.” And he took out his wallet and handed me a ten-dollar bill, one of those same tens I used to give him all the time. “Remember?” he grinned.
He turned and went back to the car. I just sat there holding it in my hand, looking after him. Gee, life was screwy.
He waited a minute by the wheel. Then he beckoned me. “Come on,” he called over genially, “get in. You don’t want to sit there on a bench in the park. We should stick together, you and me, we’ve got a lot in common.”
George Palmer went over and climbed in beside Lee Nugent, and the two of us drove off together.
He Looked Like Murder
CORNELL WOOLRICH
THE STORY
Original publication: Detective Fiction Weekly, February 8, 1941, as by William Irish; first collected in The Dancing Detective by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1946). Note: The story was retitled “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room” for its first book publication.
CORNELL GEORGE HOPLEY-WOOLRICH (1903–1968) was the very definition of a tortured soul, undoubtedly attributable to some degree to his father’s abandonment of his wife and son when he was still young. He felt himself an outsider most of his life, shy and distant, and an unusually large percentage of his characters have assumed that aura. He lived with his mother for many years and, when she died, he was truly alone in the world. Although a highly successful author, he had been so reclusive that his funeral was attended by exactly five people.
In Woolrich’s prolific fiction output of twenty-four novels and more than two hundred short stories and novellas, it is a rare character indeed who is not merely doomed but already knows it. Doomed, yes—not necessarily to death, but to a life of grinding hopelessness. No writer wh
o ever lived could write noir fiction so convincingly, so viciously, or so poignantly because, you see, it was essentially autobiographical. Not the stories, not the murders, but the worldview that shrouded almost all the helpless souls who had the misfortune to find themselves in his stories.
“He Looked Like Murder” is narrated by Stewart “Red” Carr, who lives with his best friend, Johnny Dixon, who asks him to leave the apartment so that he can be alone with Estelle, his girlfriend, for a private conversation. As Carr leaves, he sees Estelle go into the apartment. When Carr returns, Dixon appears nervous and Estelle is nowhere to be seen. When she appears to have gone missing, the police come to investigate and find her body stuffed into the incinerator chute, her neck broken. When suspicion falls on Dixon, he proclaims his innocence, telling Carr that another woman he saw that night can clear him, and flees. Carr believes his friend and begins to search for the woman but can find no trace of her, or any evidence that she ever existed.
Readers of suspense fiction in general, and Woolrich in particular, will recognize the similarity of the situation to that in his novel Phantom Lady (1942).
“He Looked Like Murder” was submitted to the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly with the title “The Fellow I Live With,” but after its initial publication it was retitled to its better-known title, “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room.”
The names of the two characters, Johnny Dixon and Carr, are an obvious tribute to Woolrich’s fellow mystery writer John Dickson Carr.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 47
