Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

  “Well, of course it does,” said Hallie.

  “Can you quote me this conversation? Just who said what . . .”

  “Why?”

  “I wish you’d try.”

  “All right.” Her face was burning. “Let’s see. First thing when I got out of my car, I called out. I said, ‘What was that?’ I didn’t know but what it had been an animal, you see. If it wasn’t, then I was scared. So I think

  I yelled out, ‘Answer me, if you’re alive . . .’ It sounds ridiculous now. But I was yelling into blank darkness. Do you understand?”

  Henry’s mien was respectful and serious. “Did he answer?” said Henry gravely.

  “Yes. He said, ‘help me.’ And when I finally found where he was he said, ‘don’t touch me.’ I couldn’t see. I could only hear. And I did hear. He said ‘doctor—telephone . . .’ Now that’s not absolutely word for word and probably not in the right order. It’s about the best I can do.”

  Her voice stopped and the silence that fell was unnatural. Henry’s foot was still.

  “What’s the matter now?” she blazed at him.

  Henry released his foot to swing a little. “The doctor finds that Bryson’s neck is broken,” he said without emphasis. “Bryson died instantly. He couldn’t have spoken at all.”

  “But . . . that’s not so!” said Hallie. “We did talk . . .”

  “You say he told you to go into town?”

  “Yes. He did.”

  Henry looked at the wall. “It was pretty scary out there, I imagine.”

  “It certainly was,” she said furiously, “but I did not panic and I am not crazy.”

  Henry sighed. He leaned towards her and said, “Don’t get mad, Hallie. That won’t do anything for either of us. I am not trying to be mean.”

  Her mouth opened. She looked into the green eyes. No, he meant what he said. He was not quoting the old childish ditty. He was not playing any game.

  She said, trying to smile, “I see. This is the way you do your job.”

  “That’s right,” said Henry.

  “And you think I must be—inaccurate?”

  “I am trying to find out the truth,” he said patiently.

  “By asking me hypothetical questions?”

  “That’s right.” The light in his eyes changed in familiar ways. She had known this man her whole life long.

  “Very well,” she said. “You ask and I’ll answer. Just don’t talk down to me, will you, Henry? I have a brain.”

  Henry smiled, flashingly. “The truth is there, you know,” he said as if to comfort her. “Now, you are out of the car, the man is on the ground, there is nobody around, it is scary. You are, of course, a responsible party. You wouldn’t hit-and-run.”

  “No,” she said proudly, “I wouldn’t.”

  “But you would like, in the worst way . . .”

  “. . . to get where there is somebody,” said Hallie promptly. “That’s right.”

  Henry’s eyes seemed to spark. “You can see the town lights from there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to get to town?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that is what you do. You get to town. It seems to you that not only your reason and your desire, but also the injured man himself tell you to go.”

  “Then you think I am only lying to myself?” she said as lightly as she could.

  Henry just kept looking at her. Hallie fought her temper. If she had not known this stranger all her life she would have been better able to deal with him. There was a personal thing between them that kept bobbing up and confusing her. She looked down at her twisting fingers and she made them go limp and lie still. “To the very best of my recollection,” she said quietly, pretending that he was not Henry Green at all, “I did have the conversation I have reported with the man on the ground.”

  “Why didn’t you try the Rock Shop, Miss Hallie?” said Meloney in rather a whining tone, as if he hadn’t been following all this too well and wanted to be in on it. “The building — You say you saw . . .”

  “Why didn’t I . . .? Oh, you mean for a telephone? But there’s no phone there.”

  “Did you go into the Rock Shop?” snapped Henry.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then what makes you say there’s no telephone?”

  Hallie sat up very stiff and straight. “Because the man told me that there was no phone.”

  “Bryson did?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Told you there was no phone in the Rock Shop?”

  “Yes,” Hallie moistened her lips. “He may have thought not . . .” she offered.

  “Walter Bryson owned that Rock Shop,” said Meloney. “He paid the phone bills. That doesn’t go, Miss Hallie.” Meloney was shaking his head from side to side sadly.

  Hallie looked from him to Henry.

  “What’s the explanation, I wonder,” said Henry softly. It seemed to her that he was looking at her with curiosity—pretending, perhaps, that she was not Hallie White at all.

  “I can see how,” she said icily, “you might explain it. You’ve got evidence, haven’t you? Whereas, I am only giving testimony. If something’s got to be incorrect, you think it has to be my impressions?”

  Meloney said, “Now, now. It’s just that what you tell us doesn’t jibe, Miss Hallie, and we’d like to straighten it around. That’s all we’re getting at.”

  “Of course,” she said. “But a fact isn’t flexible. The dead body isn’t flexible, for instance. If it doesn’t smell of liquor why, then, it doesn’t. If its neck is broken, why, then, it is, and you can prove it. When I say I was told by a dead man who couldn’t speak, that there was no phone in the Rock Shop—why, you can prove that there is a phone and that the dead man knew that. There’s something wrong, that’s obvious.” She found herself talking straight at Henry Green and, by some instinct or compulsion, fighting him. “You’d slide away from the wrongness by figuring me to be a stupid, nervous female who wanted to run away to town as fast as I could, so now I’ve dreamed up just a few good reasons for having done what I wanted to do. Of course, I don’t know that.” She was talking too much. She was being stupid and nervous.

  “People in shock or confusion,” said Henry mildly, “do make mistakes. It would explain—”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” she cried. “Where is my coat? Is it in my car?”

  “No,” said Henry cheerfully. “We had your car towed over here. No coat.”

  “What are you going to dream up to explain what’s become of it?” she challenged.

  Henry’s eyes flashed. He looked away from her.

  Meloney said, “It’s peculiar, all right. Animal wouldn’t hardly do such a thing as drag off a coat. Of course, if somebody came by and stole the coat it could be a hundred miles away by now.

  “Came by?” scoffed Hallie. “On that road? Stole from a dead body!”

  Henry said amiably, “That doesn’t go too well, does it?” His calm was an offense. His control was superior to hers. “Walter Bryson had a wallet in his pocket and it wasn’t stolen,” Henry went on.

  “Well?” said Hallie. “What are you going to do with me? Put me in jail if I won’t recant?” She was furious with this man whom she knew so well, or so little.

  Henry grinned at her. “What I’m going to do with you is take you home to your mother,” he said, sliding to his feet.

  “But do you believe me?” she demanded.

  “Certainly,” said Henry.

  Hallie felt herself collapse. “Then I don’t understand,” she murmured, rising and feeling wobbly. Even her own anger was bewildering.

  “Come along home,” he said. “We need the daylight.” He turned her with his hand on her arm and she stumbled from sudden weariness and that strange sense of collapse. “What time is it?” she said dully.

  “Four thirty.”

  “Do you always work all night?” she mumbled as he led her though the outer office to the street door.


  “No,” he said.

  He put her into the police car and got behind the wheel. He knew where to go.

  “It just beats me,” she said in a moment. “Just beats me.”

  “Let it go,” said Henry, “ ’til tomorrow. How have you been, Hallie?”

  “Fine.”

  “Working, I hear,” said Henry innocently. “In New York City. Good job?”

  “I’m a secretary,” she said listlessly.

  “Getting ahead, eh?”

  “You could say so.”

  “Not married, I take it. Got a fella?”

  “Several,” she said feebly.

  Even on the streets of the town she could feel the presence of the mountains. “Those darned mountains scare me,” she gasped. “And the desert scares me, too. I’m just a city slicker now, I guess.”

  Henry kept an uncommenting silence.

  “You never got away? I mean, you came back and settled?” she roused herself to ask.

  “Mom’s not too well,” he said. “I guess you know Dad died.”

  “I heard. I’m sorry.” Does he live with his mother, Hallie wondered. Does his mother live with—them? “Are you married, Henry?”

  “Not yet,” he answered cheerfully.

  “Are you getting ahead?” she asked in a moment, with that uncontrollable urge to quarrel with him.

  “You could say so,” he replied.

  The car stopped before her mother’s house. The familiar roofline was sharp against the stars. Henry helped her out. Now, for the first time, she realized that someone had been thoughtful enough to put her suitcases into this car. Henry, carrying them, walked with her up the stone-paved walk to the porch. “I have no key,” she said absent-

  mindedly.

  Henry stopped in his tracks. He said, rather too loudly in the silent nighttime, “Police work is honorable work, you know, Hallie. Useful, don’t you think? Meloney lets me take a great deal of the responsibility . . . considering my age. When he retires I’ll be the chief here . . . and that’s a lot of rank. When my mother . . . doesn’t need me any more I’ll have some good solid experience behind me and I’ll go onward and upward—maybe elsewhere—maybe not. But that’s my rough outline for getting ahead. Do you see it, Hallie?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, feeling surprise. “It sounds fine.” It sounds solid, she was thinking honestly, and I am not the only one who has grown up. “You’re not as young as you used to be,” she murmured.

  “Time flies,” said Henry with ridiculous cheer. “Remember This?” He began to sing in a loud, rusty baritone.

  Henry Green likes Hallie White

  Then they had a little fight

  He was mad and she was mean and . . .

  He stopped as Hallie cried out, feeling an unadmitted relief, as if what lay between them needed open mention. “Why do you have to bring that up? We were children—babies: That was a million years ago.”

  “Approximately,” said Henry.

  Then Hallie saw the light go up in her mother’s bedroom. The curtain was twitched. She heard her mother’s voice—“Why, Hallie! For Heaven’s sakes! What are you doing out there? Wait, I’m coming . . .”

  Henry fell silent and turned away. Hallie turned and saw the false dawn, green and high.

  “You woke her,” Hallie said.

  “Thought she’d never hear us talking,” said Henry Green, “but my singing voice has this penetrating quality . . .”

  “The doorbell would have frightened her, at this hour?” said Hallie humbly. “Thank you, Henry.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said in a moment, from far away.

  She knew that behind them her mother was putting on a robe, hurrying through the house. But they faced the light, so fair, that was creeping up the sky and she could see the mountains looming in a line of pure loveliness.

  Henry Green was now so still that his stillness shouted. Oh, yes, (he knew and so did she)—once, long ago, the two of them had been together in this very spot . . . But don’t think of that! “They frighten me,” gasped Hallie.

  His head turned.

  “Oh, look . . . the mountains! The light . . . It’s . . . too beautiful.” Of all the girlish idiots! “Of all the girlish idiot remarks,” she cried gaily.

  But Henry murmured, “Frightens you” with a strange little nod.

  Then her mother’s joyous voice cried behind them, “Hallie, for Heaven’s sakes, darling! How did you get here?”

  Hallie turned to be embraced. It was Henry Green who said, in his soothing quiet way, “There was a little accident, Miz White, but she’s just fine.”

  Henry Green waited until the two women vanished behind the door. Then he drove away. He stopped the car before the mortuary and went to tap upon the door. The mortician opened the door to him. “Long as I was so rudely awakened,” the man began at once, “I thought I’d get a head start on the paper work. It gets away from me. You want to see him again, Henry?”

  “Saw your lights,” said Henry. “Yes, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. Doc’s coming around to do the autopsy at eight A.M., he says. Well, I could tell him . . .”

  Henry, following, let the man’s voice buzz on. He looked down at the body of Walter Bryson where it lay. Lean body, hard-bitten face, a man in his fifties, who had been in good health, as far as anyone knew. Henry went over, hanging on to his professional curiosity, and sniffed about the head and face very carefully. He straightened, glad that his duty was done.

  The mortician said, “I’ll tell you one thing they’re not going to find. That’s any cuts or abrasions. His skin is as sound as a baby’s.”

  “Would a bruise show up?”

  The mortician shrugged.

  “Well, thanks,” said Henry, turning away. He was feeling sad.

  “I don’t know what I thought I was going to find out. Best leave it to the experts, eh?”

  The man began to expound eagerly on the subject of the stupidity of some experts, all the while trotting beside Henry to the exit.

  Henry got away and drove into the growing dawn on Paintbrush Road that used to be called, when he was younger, the cut-off. At the scene of the accident Henry got out and conscientiously began to recheck the measurements of the marks on the pavement. The girl had certainly been smart, and quick, and she had not wrecked her car.

  But he was trying to put Hallie White out of his mind. He didn’t know her, not any more. He had caught only glimpses of her through the years. Oh, he had heard, of course, where she was and what she was doing—as the tale was told around the town. ‘Henry Green likes Hallie White,’ the town tended to keep the present tense. But the tense should be past. Did he, now, like this young woman from the city? This stranger?

  And yet . . . and yet . . . her face, her dark eyes, swam pictured in his mind, and for some uncancellable reason she was his girl. It was an old indelible impression that had no warrant. Henry wished he could be rid of it.

  Claimed to have a brain, did she? (Henry made himself begin to think). Able to be logical? Maybe so. But, if so, did she see where logic led? He didn’t think she did. Not yet. But Henry did. Although Henry knew very well . . . oh, very well . . . that logic did not always prevail and life was not that orderly, he tried to proceed with logic, in order. He had better check everything.

  When he came to the spot where the body had been lying there was nothing to be seen there, nothing significant, not a clue. Nowhere on the desert could he see a woman’s coat, but the desert floor was by no means flat and who could say what might lie behind a wild plant, a heap of rock, or a hummock?

  A faint halloo came to his ears and he turned to see old John Bryson in the door of the Rock Shop. Henry strode that way.

  Old John had changed his clothing. He wore jeans and a clean gray sweat shirt. He said, “Morning, Henry. Couldn’t stand it up to the house somehow. Do you want to come in? What should be done about his car?”

  “We’ll send for it,” Henry said.
He and Meloney had examined both the car and the shop last night and seen nothing remarkable. But Henry stepped into the shop. “Couple of things I’d like to ask you,” he said, looking around by daylight. Counters and shelves had been built along the walls of one room. There were narrow crude tables in the center. All surfaces were spread with specimens of rock, or displays of machines for cutting and polishing. The place was exactly like a hundred other such shops that Henry had seen, places where rock-hounds came to buy or to sell. There was a desk that wasn’t much more than a plank on two chests of drawers. There was one chair.

  “Sit down, Henry,” said John Bryson cordially. “How is that girl? Pretty terrible for her.”

  “She knows it was an accident,” said Henry gently. “What was Walter doing down here at such an hour in the morning? You have any idea?”

  “I don’t know,” said the old man. “I can’t think.”

  “He’d been inside, all right. The back door was unlocked.”

  “Yes, it was still unlocked this morning.”

  “Would he have come down to meet somebody?”

  “Who?” said old John. “I can’t think—”

  Henry, who had not taken the one chair, wandered along the counters. “What was he doing last evening earlier? Was he at home?”

  “Oh, yes. He was watching television, as far as I know. Up until about midnight. I know that.”

  “You were watching, too?”

  “No, no. I was puttering around my own room. I went to bed about midnight. Must have dropped off right away.”

  “Hear the phone ring?”

  The old man blinked.

  “Trying to figure what brought him down here,” Henry explained.

  “I don’t know, Henry. If it rang so late I’d have put it down for being on the TV.”

  “Voices too, eh?” Henry nodded. “Didn’t hear his car go out?”

  “Don’t think so. Of course, he comes and goes . . . he came and went, I should say . . . without having to tell me where or why. He was a good nephew to me, Henry.” The old man looked as if he were going to cry.

  “Walter was pretty well-off, I understand,” said Henry, picking up some quartz pebbles and letting them slip through his fingers. “Who inherits?”