I hadn’t until then. I thought maybe this was twenty minutes later. “Just a minute.” I reached for the switch with my free hand, put on the light, looked at the clock. Horrified incredulity sparked from the look. Quarter to three in the morning. He’d been gone himself nearly three hours. She was supposed to have left for home over three-and-a-half hours ago—and she only lived six blocks away.
I didn’t know what to say. “He—he stepped down to the corner and he hasn’t come back yet—” I faltered. But I’d told her that hours ago.
The voice was repressing hysteria only with the greatest difficulty. It was all shredded and coming apart. “Why does he refuse to come to the phone himself and face me like a man? What does he think he’ll gain by avoiding me like this? He can’t do this to me. I warned her, I told her all along if she kept on seeing him, something would happen sooner or later—”
I didn’t say anything this time; what was there I could say any more?
The voice was utterly beyond control now, had disintegrated. It was awful to have to stand there and listen to it—harrowing; it went right through you. “I want my little girl back! What’s he done with her? I’m going to notify the police. They’ll help me, they’ll find out why she doesn’t come home—”
Suddenly she had hung up, there was silence.
And then, just a minute too late, his key dialed the lock and he came in, looking haunted.
“Well, it’s about time!” I said wrathfully. “Where the hell have you been? You go down for just one drink and you stay down half the night—and let me do your dirty work for you up here!”
Something electric flickered over his face, I couldn’t tell what it was. “What’s up?”
“You’re in trouble, that’s what’s up. Your girl never got home from here tonight. Her mother’s phoned twice since you’ve been gone, and the last time she said she was going to notify the police. You better get over there fast and find out what’s happened—”
I waited. He waited too. He just stood there looking at me, without moving.
“Well, don’t you think you’d better at least call her back?”
“She wouldn’t listen to me, she wouldn’t give a chance to— She hates me, she’s been trying to break us up. If anything’s happened—this is my finish.”
“That’s no kind of a reason. The girl was over here and she knows it; at least get in touch with the woman. If you don’t, she’s liable to think the worst.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you; she does already. No matter what I’d do, she’d—”
I didn’t know what to do against a line of reasoning like that; it was all haywire. It was going to lead him into trouble, if he wasn’t in it already.
I shut up for awhile and watched him. Didn’t stare at him, I mean, but just studied him offside. He wasn’t drunk. He’d been down drinking for three solid hours—supposedly—and yet he wasn’t drunk. I thought I’d like to find out about that. “Where were you, at McGinnis’s?” I asked offhandedly.
He nodded dully, looking at the floor.
That was the place on our corner. I’d been in there with him often enough. They had bowlfuls of these oyster crackers sitting at each end of the long bar. Unless it was very crowded—and it wouldn’t be at three in the morning on a rainy Monday—you’d take your stand somewhere along the midsection. When you went down for crackers, you’d bring back a few at a time with you, to save yourself making the trip down and back too often. I’d never been in there with him yet but what he hadn’t had a few left over in his pocket when he came away.
He’d hung his coat off the northeast corner of his chair. “Got a cigarette?” I said, and went over to it and reached down into the flap pocket. A solitary oyster cracker came up in my hand.
“You didn’t get much of an edge,” I said, taking one of my own cigarettes instead, without letting him see me. He could have been in there five minutes and still put that cracker in his pocket. Two-and-a-half. And then what had become of the other two hours and fifty-five?
“I didn’t even finish the one drink I bought, just sat there moping. I didn’t realize how time passed. There are times you feel too low even to—”
I was standing by the window with my back to him, looking down at the patent-leather finish the rain had given the street. I stiffened my back at one point. That was the only indication to show I was seeing anything. I thought I’d better give it to him ahead of time, though, let him get ready. I said without turning my head: “A cop just got out and came in here. I saw the glint of his visor disk.”
“Red, you’ve got to stick by me.”
This time I did turn my head, fast. “What do you mean I’ve got to stick by you?”
He clutched at the back of his neck, groped for the answer. “If they come here and ask you if—if you saw her leave, tell them you did. Tell them you came along just in time to see me come down to the street door with her and put her in a taxi.”
“But I didn’t.” My tone was flat as an 1890 dime.
“I know you didn’t, but if you’d been five minutes sooner you would have. Don’t you see, the way it is now, no one saw her leave here. She ends here. If I can at least produce someone that’ll say they saw her leave here—That five minutes makes all the difference.”
I remembered the dry soles of his shoes. I had to be sure of what I was doing. I thought: I’ll give him one more chance on that. If he gives me a second wrong answer, he can go to blazes. “But which’ll I be doing?” I said. “Describing something I just missed seeing, or describing something that—didn’t happen for anyone to see? Are you sure you took her down to the door and put her in a cab?”
I don’t know if my steely look warned him off, or he just thought better of it himself. His luck was he gave the right answer this time. “N-no,” he corrected himself, “I didn’t take her down to the door myself. But you can be sure she left here, and you can be sure she left here in a taxi—”
“The first time, you told me you took her down and put her in the taxi.”
“I know; it wasn’t this serious yet, it didn’t seem to matter much one way or another then. I was ashamed to let you think I was heel enough not to see her off right. We parted on the outs, she just walked out. Then I heard her whistling up a taxi from the doorway downstairs. I could hear it plainly through the windows. I heard one drive up, she darted out and climbed into it, and—”
“Wait a minute. You saw her get into it?”
He gave me a harried look. “I got over to the window a minute too late. Her figure had just crouched in. Her hand was still on the doorcatch, pulling it to after her. What the hell. Who else could it have been? She had just left the room up here a minute before. I stayed on there at the window after the cab drove off, brooding down into the rain for a good five minutes or more, and no one else came out of the house. That must have been she in the cab. Now is it going to hurt you to say you saw that too, from down at the corner? All I’m asking, Red, is—”
Before I could answer, the knock had already sounded on the door. The knock we’d both been expecting from one minute to the next, held back like a Chinese water-drop torture. I jerked my thumb toward the sound, as much as to say: “There’s your party now.”
Even then he found time to make his plea once more, in a husky, anxious whisper, as he edged reluctantly across the room: “Are you with me, Red? How about it, are you with me?”
He sure needed moral support bad. I couldn’t help wondering why he should. Why wasn’t his own sense of innocence backing-up enough?
It was just the curtain raiser, this first time. Just routine, just a uniformed patrolman sent around to check. No question of foul play yet, Missing Persons didn’t even have it yet. Just the complaint of the crazed mother.
For that very reason I couldn’t help wondering, as I saw that shield coming in the door, that openly
worn shield that usually forecast little more than a ticket for parking overtime or a warning to “Cut out that noise up here now,” why Dixon should be so ready to expect the worst beforehand, why he should seem so—how’ll I put it?—ahead of the game. He seemed rushing to meet the worst possible conclusion before anyone else was, including the authorities themselves. Always excepting the mother. And mothers—are they gifted with special foresight or are they blinded by lack of it?
It went off very smoothly, without a hitch. The cop jotted in a notebook, Dixon answered what he asked him. “…About quarter to twelve….No, I offered to, but she wouldn’t let me, she said she had a raincoat, and she’d get a cab right from the door….” (Distorting what he’d told me, that they’d parted “on the outs.”)
That reminded me of something. I looked over at the table where I’d put that ripped-off raincoat clasp I’d trodden on. It wasn’t there any more. I looked at Dixon. He looked down his cheeks.
The cop only asked me one thing. “Were you here?”
I answered the one thing with only one word, “No.” That was the extent of my participation. The problem in ethics Dixon had posed for me hadn’t even come up—yet.
The cop left. We went to bed. It was four by that time. He was still awake when I went to sleep. He was awake again—or yet—when I woke up. We didn’t talk about it. I was in too much of a hurry and too half-slept to be able to give a thought to anything but getting down on time. I tore out of the place without a word, kiting my coat after me by one-quarter of one sleeve length.
He wasn’t there when I got back. Someone else was. I put the key to the door and came in and found a man making himself at home in our easy-chair, pretending to read a newspaper. You could tell he’d just picked it up when he heard me at the door. One edge of the carpet was a little rippled, as though it had been turned over, then flung back.
We’d had the curtain raiser. Now this was the First Act.
I said “What goes on?” without too much cordiality.
He showed a badge, said: “Super let me in to wait for you boys. You Carr? You the other fellow that lives here with Dixon?”
“That’s who.”
“A girl named Estelle Mitchell came here last night, didn’t she?”
“Okay if I sit down? I had to stand all the way home.” I sat.
“Well?”
“Yes,” I said coolly, “there was a girl dropped in here last night, and I believe her name was Mitchell.”
“What time’d she get here?”
“Eight-thirty.”
“You saw her come in?”
“I met her on the stairs, on my way out.”
“What time’d you get back yourself?”
“Close to twelve.”
“Was she still here then?”
“She’d just left.”
“How’d you know she just left? Did your friend tell you that, or did you see her leave?”
The problem in ethics had come up. It wasn’t my own skin I gave a rap about. If I could have been sure of him, Dixon. I would have gladly said I took her back to her own door myself, and the hell with this dick and all other dicks. But I wasn’t as sure of him as—well, as I would have liked to be. “I as good as saw her leave.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“As I turned the corner and came in sight of the house here, I saw a cab standing waiting to take on someone at the door. I saw a figure run out and get in it, and I saw my friend standing up at the window looking down—”
“You’re positive it was she?”
“That isn’t what I said.” I was willing to step as far over the line for him as I possibly could, but not all the way—until I was surer. I have a funny conscience, awfully inelastic, practically no give to it at all. “I’m positive it was a girl. But the night was too murky and I was too far away to be able to recognize her face. When I got upstairs a minute later, he told me she’d just left. Draw your own conclusions.”
“Had you ever seen this Mitchell girl before?”
“No, last night on the stairs was the first time I met her.”
That inclined him to leniency in my favor, I could see. I mean, about this figure-in-the-doorway angle. How could I be expected to recognize her from a distance, in a needle rain? “What time does he get back as a rule?”
He was always back before now other nights. I wasn’t going to give him away on that. “Oh, he’s not very punctual,” I said carelessly. “He may have stopped off at the Mitchells’ to see if they’ve had any word.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll wait,” he said doggedly.
“Is it all right if I step out and feed? I’ve been running on a malted milk since noon.”
He made a reassuring hand pass toward me. “You go ahead, Carr.”
I didn’t like the way that sounded. As much as to say, It’s not you we’re after.
I gave him a look, but I got up and went. I headed for a place around the corner. The tire of a parked car went out with a sharp hiss just before I rounded it. Only it was on the wrong side of me, where there were doorways instead of a roadway. He was standing there in one of them. I stopped short, veered in. “Well, I’ll be blamed! What’re you doing in there, playing hide-and-seek?”
“My shoelace came undone, I had to step in here and fasten it.” Then he said, “Has anyone been around?”
“There’s a dick up there right now waiting to talk to you.”
Even so, he shouldn’t have flinched the way he did. I waited for him to make a move; he didn’t.
“Well, why don’t you go up and get it over with?”
He just looked at me, like I was asking him to go into a den with a man-eating lion.
“Have you been around to the Mitchells’?”
He shook his head, looked down.
“Haven’t you even called up to find out? You mean you haven’t once gotten in touch with them since last night?”
“The old lady hates me, I tell you. She’ll fly off the handle, scream all kinds of things at me. I can’t face it, now less than ever.”
“Look, Dixon,” I tried to point out, “you’re doing all the wrong things, all the way through this. Now don’t start off on the wrong foot, there’s no reason why you should. I know how it is, you’re nervous and jumpy—but you didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance, why should you dodge her mother or the dicks or any guard-dam one else?”
“Even you,” he said bitterly, “you ought to see your eyes when you say that. There’s a sort of steely stare in them, like you weren’t sure yourself.”
I hadn’t meant to let him see that, it must have shown without my knowing it. I figured the best—and kindest—way to cover that up was to ignore the accusation altogether. “You better go on up to the place, Dixon,” I advised him crisply. “Your shoelace is fastened now.”
I walked away thinking, “He’s not the type this should have happened to, he’s going to make a mess of it before he’s through.” If it had happened to me, for instance, me with my red hair, I would have been hanging around Headquarters day and night, getting in their way, cursing them out for not finding her quicker. He seemed to sort of skulk and act suspicious.
I ate and then I went back. He was out again. And this time the dick was too. He came in about forty minutes afterwards. He almost seemed to reel in. He looked all drained of blood; he’d turned so white that it wouldn’t wear off. And when he took off his coat and vest, there was a regular dark stain down the back of his shirt, he’d sweated so.
“They had me down at Headquarters to question me,” he said. He slumped into a chair, pulled the knot of his tie loose as though it were choking him, took a long shuddering breath in different wave lengths. “I thought they weren’t going to let me go, at one time, but in the end they did.”
I pitched up my shoulders. “Why s
houldn’t they let you go?”
He didn’t say. “Gee, I can’t stand much more of this.”
“I dunno, you never seemed particularly sensitive until now,” I let him know. “Why should you let it get you like this? They gotta ask questions, don’t they? There’s nothing personal in it—”
He gave a bitter laugh. “They made it seem pretty personal, down there just now.”
I thought, “If you acted down there like you’re acting up here, you didn’t do yourself any too much good!” If he wouldn’t help himself, somebody ought to at least try to put an oar in for him, and I supposed that left it up to me. I walked around the room awhile. Finally I stopped by him, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, for your own sake, I want you to do something for me. Call up the mother and at least say something to her, don’t just lie low like this. At least find out if anything’s been heard.”
He shied, right away. “I keep telling you, in her mind I’m already responsible for whatever’s happened, and there’s nothing I can do or say—”
I took another few turns around the room. “Did the girl mean anything to you at all?” I spat curtly.
That caught him off guard. “Red, I was crazy about her, I was mad about her, I’da done anything rather than lose her. I’da rather seen her dead than have her go to him—” He realized too late how that sounded, bit it off short.
Everything wrong; he said and did everything wrong.
“Well, that’s a crack I wouldn’t make twice,” I advised astringently. I picked up the phone.
“What’re you going to do?”
“What’s their number? What’s the number of her house?”
He gave it to me. I called it for him. A man answered first. For some reason I got the idea he was a detective, over there talking to them. “Mrs. Mitchell, please.”
“Who is this wants her?”
“Dixon wants to speak to her,” I said noncommittally.
Sure, he must have been a detective. There was too long a wait. They must have been talking it over—Suddenly I heard her say distinctly, within a foot of the phone, to someone else, “You shouldn’t make me, you shouldn’t ask me to.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 49
