No! No footsteps in the passage outside—no sound of a tread, light or heavy, in the room above—absolute silence everywhere. Besides locking and bolting my door, I had moved an only wooden chest against it, which I had found under the bed. To remove this chest (my blood ran cold as I thought of what its contents might be!) without making some disturbance was impossible: and, moreover, to think of escaping through the house, now barred up for the night, was sheer insanity. Only one chance was left me—the window. I stole to it on tiptoe.
My bedroom was on the first floor, above an entresol, and looked into the back street. I raised my hand to open the window, knowing that on that action hung, by the merest hair-breadth, my chance of safety. They keep vigilant watch in a House of Murder. If any part of the frame cracked, if the hinge creaked, I was a lost man! It must have occupied me at least five minutes, reckoning by time—five hours, reckoning by suspense—to open that window. I succeeded in doing it silently—in doing it with all the dexterity of a housebreaker—and then looked down into the street. To leap the distance beneath me would be almost certain destruction! Next, I looked round at the sides of the house. Down the left side ran a thick water-pipe—it passed close by the outer edge of the window. The moment I saw the pipe I knew I was saved. My breath came and went freely for the first time since I had seen the canopy of the bed moving down upon me!
To some men the means of escape which I had discovered might have seemed difficult and dangerous enough—to me the prospect of slipping down the pipe into the street did not suggest even a thought of peril. I had always been accustomed, by the practice of gymnastics, to keep up my schoolboy powers as a daring and expert climber; and knew that my head, hands, and feet would serve me faithfully in any hazards of ascent or descent. I had already got one leg over the window-sill, when I remembered the handkerchief filled with money under my pillow. I could well have afforded to leave it behind me, but I was revengefully determined that the miscreants of the gambling-house should miss their plunder as well as their victim. So I went back to the bed and tied the heavy handkerchief at my back by my cravat.
Just as I had made it tight and fixed it in a comfortable place, I thought I heard a sound of breathing outside the door. The chill feeling of horror ran through me again as I listened. No! Dead silence still in the passage—I had only heard the night air blowing softly into the room. The next moment I was on the window-sill—and the next I had a firm grip on the water-pipe with my hands and knees.
I slid down into the street easily and quietly, as I thought I should, and immediately set off at the top of my speed to a branch “Prefecture” of Police, which I knew was situated in the immediate neighborhood. A “Sub-prefect,” and several picked men among his subordinates, ‘happened to be up, maturing, I believe, some scheme for discovering the perpetrator of a mysterious murder which all Paris was talking of just then. When I began my story, in a breathless hurry and in very bad French, I could see that the Sub-prefect suspected me of being a drunken Englishman who had robbed somebody; but he soon altered his opinion as I went on, and before I had anything like concluded, he shoved all the papers before him into a drawer, put on his hat, supplied me with another (for I was bare-headed), ordered a file of soldiers, desired his expert followers to get ready all sorts of tools for breaking open doors and ripping up brick flooring, and took my arm, in the most friendly and familiar manner possible, to lead me with him out of the house. I will venture to say that when the Sub-prefect was a little boy, and was taken for the first time to the play, he was not half as much pleased as he was now at the job in prospect for him at the gambling-house!
Away we went through the streets, the Sub-prefect cross-examining and congratulating me in the same breath as we marched at the head of our formidable posse comitatus. Sentinels were placed at the back and front of the house the moment we got to it; a tremendous battery of knocks was directed against the door; a light appeared at a window; I was told to conceal myself behind the police—then came more knocks and a cry of “Open in the name of the law!” At that terrible summons bolts and locks gave way before an invisible hand, and the moment after the Sub-prefect was in the passage, confronting a waiter half-dressed and ghastly pale. This was the short dialogue which immediately took place:
“We want to see the Englishman who is sleeping in this house?”
“He went away hours ago.”
“He did no such thing. His friend went away; he remained. Show us to his bedroom!”
“I swear to you, Monsieur le Sous-prefect, he is not here! he—”
“I swear to you, Monsieur Le Garçon, he is. He slept here—he didn’t find your bed comfortable—he came to us to complain of it—here he is among my men—and here am I ready to look for a flea or two in his bedstead. Renaudin! (calling to one of the subordinates, and pointing to the waiter) collar that man and tie his hands behind him. Now, then, gentlemen, let us walk upstairs!”
Every man and woman in the house was secured—the “Old Soldier” the first. Then I identified the bed in which I had slept, and then we went into the room above.
No object that was all extraordinary appeared in any part of it. The Sub-prefect looked round the place, commanded everybody to be silent, stamped twice on the floor, called for a candle, looked attentively at the spot he had stamped on, and ordered the flooring there to be carefully taken up. This was done in no time. Lights were produced, and we saw a deep raftered cavity between the floor of this room and the ceiling of the room beneath. Through this cavity there ran perpendicularly a sort of case of iron thickly greased; and inside the case appeared the screw, which communicated with the bed-top below. Extra lengths of screw, freshly oiled; levers covered with felt: all the complete upper works of a heavy press—constructed with infernal ingenuity so as to join the fixtures below, and when taken to pieces again to go into the smallest possible compass—were next discovered and pulled out on the floor. After some little difficulty the Sub-prefect succeeded in putting the machinery together, and, leaving his men to work it, descended with me to the bedroom. The smothering canopy was then lowered, but not so noiselessly as I had seen it lowered. When I mentioned this to the Sub-prefect, his answer, simple as it was, had a terrible significance. “My men,” said he, “are working down the bed-top for the first time—the men whose money you won were in better practice.”
We left the house in the sole possession of two police agents—every one of the inmates being removed to prison on the spot. The Sub-prefect, after taking down my “procès verbal” in his office, returned with me to my hotel to get my passport. “Do you think,” I asked, as I gave it to him, “that any men have really been smothered in that bed, as they tried to smother me?”
“I have seen dozens of drowned men laid out at the Morgue,” answered the Sub-prefect, “in whose pocketbooks were found letters stating that they had committed suicide in the Seine, because they had lost everything at the gaming table. Do I know how many of those men entered the same gambling-house that you entered? Won as you won? Took that bed as you took it? Slept in it? Were smothered in it? And were privately thrown into the river, with a letter of explanation written by the murderers and placed in their pocketbooks? No man can say how many or how few have suffered the fate from which you have escaped. The people of the gambling-house kept their bedstead machinery a secret from us—even from the police! The dead kept the rest of the secret for them. Goodnight, or rather good-morning. Monsieur Faulkner! Be at my office again at nine o’clock—in the meantime, au revoir!”
The rest of my story is soon told. I was examined and reexamined; the gambling-house was strictly searched all through from top to bottom; the prisoners were separately interrogated; and two of the less guilty among them made a confession. I discovered that the Old Soldier was the master of the gambling-house-^justice discovered that he had been drummed out of the army as a vagabond years ago; that he had been guilty of all sorts of villainies since; that he was in possession of stolen property, which the
owners identified; and that he, the croupier, another accomplice, and the woman who had made my cup of coffee, were all in the secret of the bedstead. There appeared some reason to doubt whether the inferior persons attached to the house knew anything of the suffocating machinery; and they received the benefit of that doubt, by being treated simply as thieves and vagabonds. As for the Old Soldier and his two head myrmidons, they went to the galleys; the woman who had drugged my coffee was imprisoned for I forget how many years; the regular attendants at the gambling-house were considered “suspicious” and placed under “surveillance”; and I became, for one whole week (which is a long time) the head “lion” in Parisian society. My adventure was dramatized by three illustrious play-makers, but never saw theatrical daylight; for the censorship forbade the introduction on the stage of a correct copy of the gambling-house bedstead.
One good result was produced by my adventure, which any censorship must have approved: it cured me of ever again trying “Rouge et Noir” as an amusement. The sight of a green cloth, with packs of cards and heaps of money on it, will henceforth be forever associated in my mind with the sight of a bed canopy descending to suffocate me in the silence and darkness of the night.
The Room With Something Wrong By Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968)
Cornell Woolrich was a tormented and haunted man who wrote about tormented and haunted people. His mastery of suspense in such novels as The Bride Wore Black (1940) is based on his belief that darkness is always threatening to overwhelm us. Even his straight detective stories, such as “The Room with Something Wrong,” from a 1938 pulp magazine, contain Woolrichian elements of irrationality in the motive of the murderer and the growing obsession of the detective. And few writers could equal Woolrich in capturing the despair of the Depression and its seedy hotels and often shabby characters. It is unexpected that two such different writers as Wilkie Collins and Cornell Woolrich are joined by the common theme of a murderous room. Which story is the more terrifying we leave to the reader to decide.
THEY thought it was the Depression the first time it happened. The guy had checked in one night in the black March of 33, in the middle of the memorable bank holiday. He was well-dressed and respectable-looking. He had baggage with him, plenty of it, so he wasn’t asked to pay in advance. Everyone was short of ready cash that week. Besides, he’d asked for the weekly rate.
He signed the register James Hopper, Schenectady, and Dennison, eyeing the red vacancy-tags in the pigeonholes, pulled out the one in 913 at random and gave him that. Not the vacancy-tag, the room. The guest went up, okayed the room, and George the bellhop was sent up with his bags. George came down and reported a dime without resentment; it was ‘33, after all.
Striker had sized him up, of course. That was part of his duties, and the house detective found nothing either for him or against him. Striker had been with the St. Anselm two years at that time. He’d had his salary cut in ‘31, and then again in ‘32, but so had everyone else on the staff. He didn’t look much like a house dick, which was why he was good for the job. He was a tall, lean, casual-moving guy, without that annoying habit most hotel dicks have of staring people out of countenance. He used finesse about it; got the same results, but with sort of a blank, idle expression as though he were thinking of something else. He also lacked the usual paunch, in spite of his sedentary life, and never wore a hard hat. He had a little radio in his top-floor cubbyhole and a stack of vintage “fantastics,” pulp magazines dealing with super-science and the supernatural, and that seemed to be all he asked of life.
The newcomer who had signed as Hopper came down again in about half an hour and asked Dennison if there were any good movies nearby. The clerk recommended one and the guest went to it. This was about eight p.m. He came back at eleven, picked up his key, and went up to his room. Dennison and Striker both heard him whistling lightly under his breath as he stepped into the elevator. Nothing on his mind but a good night’s rest, apparently.
Striker turned in himself at twelve. He was subject to call twenty-four hours a day. There was no one to relieve him.
The St. Anselm was on the downgrade, and had stopped having an assistant house dick about a year before.
He was still awake, reading in bed, about an hour later when the deskman rang him. “Better get down here quick, Strike! Nine-thirteen’s just fallen out!” The clerk’s voice was taut, frightened.
Striker threw on coat and pants over his pajamas and got down as fast as the creaky old-fashioned elevator would let him. He went out to the street, around to the side under the 13-line.
Hopper was lying there dead, the torn leg of his pajamas rippling in the bitter March night wind. There wasn’t anyone else around at that hour except the night porter, the policeman he’d called, and who had called his precinct house in turn, and a taxi driver or two. Maxon, the midnight-to-morning clerk (Dennison went off at eleven-thirty), had to remain at his post for obvious reasons. They were just standing there waiting for the morgue ambulance; there wasn’t anything they could do.
Bob, the night porter, was saying: “I thought it was a pillow someone drap out the window. I come up the basement way, see a thick white thing lying there, flappin’ in th’ wind. I go over, fix to kick it with my foot—” He broke off. “Golly, man!”
One of the drivers said, “I seen him comin’ down.” No one disputed the point, but he insisted, “No kidding, I seen him coming down! I was just cruisin’ past, one block over, and I look this way, and I see—whisht ungh—like a pancake!”
The other cab driver, who hadn’t seen him coming down, said: “I seen you head down this way, so I thought you spotted a fare, and I chased after you.”
They got into a wrangle above the distorted form. “Yeah, you’re always chiselin’ in on my hails. Follyn’ me around. Can’t ye get none o’ your own?”
Striker crossed the street, teeth chattering, and turned and looked up the face of the building. Half the French window of 913 was open, and the room was lit up. All the rest of the line was dark, from the top floor down.
He crossed back to where the little group stood shivering and stamping their feet miserably. “He sure picked a night for it!” winced the cop. The cab driver opened his mouth a couple of seconds ahead of saying something, which was his speed, and the cop turned on him irritably. “Yeah, we know! You seen him coming down. Go home, will ya!”
Striker went in, rode up, and used his passkey on 913. The light was on, as he had ascertained from the street. He stood there in the doorway and looked around. Each of the 13 s, in the St. Anselm, was a small room with private bath. There was an opening on each of the four sides of these rooms: the tall, narrow, old-fashioned room door leading in from the hall; in the wall to the left of that, the door to the bath, of identical proportions; in the wall to the right of the hall door, a door giving into the clothes closet, again of similar measurements. These three panels were in the style of the Nineties, not your squat modern aperture. Directly opposite the room door was a pair of French windows looking out onto the street. Each of them matched the door measurements. Dark blue roller-shades covered the glass on the inside.
But Striker wasn’t thinking about all that particularly, just then. He was interested only in what the condition of the room could tell him: whether it had been suicide or an accident. The only thing disturbed in the room was the bed, but that was not violently disturbed as by a struggle, simply normally disarranged as by someone sleeping. Striker, for some reason or other, tested the sheets with the back of his hand for a minute. They were still warm from recent occupancy. Hopper’s trousers were neatly folded across the seat of a chair. His shirt and underclothes were draped over the back of it. His shoes stood under it, toe to toe and heel to heel. He was evidently a very neat person.
He had unpacked. He must have intended to occupy the room for the full week he had bargained for. In the closet, when Striker opened it, were his hat, overcoat, jacket and vest, the latter three on separate hangers. The dresser drawers he
ld his shirts and other linen. On top of the dresser was a white-gold wristwatch, a handful of change, and two folded squares of paper. One was a glossy handbill from the show the guest had evidently attended only two hours ago. Saturday through Tuesday—the laugh riot, funniest, most tuneful picture of the year, “Hips Hips Hooray!” Also “Popeye the Sailor.” Nothing in that to depress anyone.
The other was a note on hotel stationery—Hotel Management: Sorry to do this here, but I had to do it somewhere.
It was unsigned. So it was suicide after all. One of the two window halves, the one to the right stood inward to the room. The one he had gone through.
“You the houseman?” a voice asked from the doorway.
Striker turned and a precinct detective came in. You could tell he was that. He couldn’t have looked at a dandelion without congenital suspicion or asked the time of day without making it a leading question. “Find anything?”
Striker handed over the note without comment.
Perry, the manager, had come up with him, in trousers and bathrobe. He was a stout, jovial-looking man ordinarily, but right now he was only stout. “He hadn’t paid yet, either,” he said ruefully to the empty room. He twisted the cord of his robe around one way, then he undid it and twisted it around the other way. He was very unhappy. He picked the wristwatch up gingerly by the end of its strap and dangled it close to his ear, as if to ascertain whether or not it had a good movement.
The precinct dick went to the window and looked down, opened the bath door and looked in, the closet door and looked in. He gave the impression of doing this just to give the customers their money’s worth; in other words, as far as he was concerned, the note had clinched the case.
“It’s the old suey, all right,” he said and, bending over at the dresser, read aloud what he was jotting down. “James Hopper, Skun-Skunnect—”
Death Locked In Page 26
