Tales for a Stormy Night

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Before midnight Coyne confessed to the three homicides, the last two premeditated. He had not intended to kill Elsie Troy. But he had been watching her behavior with young Alvin Rugg, and as her husband’s friend he had taken the excuse of fixing her steps to gain her company and reproach her. She had called him “a nasty little man,” and where matters had gone from that, he said, he could not clearly remember…except that he killed her. He was sure because of the wonderful exhilaration it gave him after he had done it—so wonderful it had to be repeated.

  The chief had pride in his eyes, commending Captain Fox for so fine a job. They went upstairs together to see the mayor, and there the chief took major credit as his due. He announced, however, that this would be his last case before retirement, and he put his arm about Captain Fox as the reporters were invited in. Fox asked to be excused.

  “Damn, it, man, you’ve got to do the talking,” the chief protested.

  “Yes, sir, if you say so,” Fox said. “But first I want to call my wife.”

  “By all means,” the chief said. “Here, use the mayor’s phone.”

  Nancy answered on the first ring.

  “Will you pick me up tonight, my dear, on your way home?” Fox said.

  1957

  Mrs. Norris Observes

  IF THERE WAS ANYTHING in the world Mrs. Norris liked as well as a nice cup of tea, it was to dip now and then into what she called “a comfortable novel.” She found it no problem getting one when she and Mr. James Jarvis, for whom she kept house, were in the country. The ladies at the Nyack library both knew and approved her tastes, and while they always lamented that such books were not written any more, nonetheless they always managed to find a new one for her.

  But the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street was a house of different entrance. How could a person like Mrs. Norris climb those wide marble steps, pass muster with the uniformed guard, and then ask for her particular kind of book?

  She had not yet managed it, but sometimes she got as far as the library steps and thought about it. And if the sun were out long enough to have warmed the stone bench, she sometimes sat a few moments and observed the faces of the people going in and coming out. As her friend Mr. Tully, the detective, said of her, she was a marvelous woman for observing. “And you can take that the way you like, love.”

  It was a pleasant morning, this one, and having time to spare, Mrs. Norris contemplated the stone bench. She also noticed that one of her shoelaces had come untied; you could not find a plain cotton lace these days, even on a blind man’s tray. She locked her purse between her bosom and her arm and began to stoop.

  “It’s mine! I saw it first!”

  A bunioned pump thumped down almost on her toe, and the woman who owned it slyly turned it over on her ankle so that she might retrieve whatever it was she had found. Mrs. Norris was of the distinct opinion that there had been nothing there at all.

  “I was only about to tie my shoelace,” Mrs. Norris said, pulling as much height as she could out of her dumpy shape.

  A wizened, rouged face turned up at her. “Aw,” the creature said, “you’re a lady. I’ll tie the lace for you.”

  As the woman fumbled at her foot, Mrs. Norris took time to observe the shaggy hair beneath a hat of many summers. Then she cried, “Get up from there! I’m perfectly able to tie my own shoelace.”

  The woman straightened, and. she was no taller than Mrs. Norris. “Did I hear in your voice that you’re Irish?”

  “You did not! I’m Scots-born.” Then remembering Mr. Tully, her detective friend, she added, “But I’m sometimes taken for North of Ireland.”

  “Isn’t it strange, the places people will take you to be from! Where would you say I was born? Sit down for a moment. You’re not in a hurry?”

  Mrs. Norris thought the woman daft, but she spoke well and softly. “I haven’t the faintest notion,” she said, and allowed herself to be persuaded by a grubby hand.

  “I was born right down there on Thirty-seventh Street, and not nearly as many years ago as you would think. But this town—oh, the things that have happened to it!” She sat a bit too close, and folded her hands over a beaded evening purse. “A friend of mine, an actress, gave this to me.” She indicated the purse, having seen Mrs. Norris glance at it. “But there isn’t much giving left in this city…”

  Of course, Mrs. Norris thought. How foolish of her not to have realized what was coming. “What a dreadful noise the buses make,” she commented by way of changing the subject.

  “And they’re all driven by Irishmen,” the woman said quite venomously. “They’ve ruined New York, those people!”

  “I have a gentleman friend who is Irish,” Mrs. Norris said sharply, and wondered why she didn’t get up and out of there.

  “Oh, my dear,” the woman said, pulling a long face of shock. “The actress of whom I just spoke, you know? She used to be with the Abbey Theatre. She was the first Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Or perhaps it was the second. But she sends me two tickets for every opening night—and something to wear.” The woman opened her hand on the beaded purse and stroked it lovingly. “She hasn’t had a new play in such a long time.”

  Mrs. Norris was touched in spite of herself: it was a beautiful gesture. “Were you ever in the theater yourself?” she asked.

  The old woman looked her full in the face. Tears came to her eyes. Then she said, “No.” She tumbled out a whole series of no’s as though to bury the matter. She’s protesting too much, Mrs. Norris thought. “But I have done many things in my life,” she continued in her easy made-up-as-you-go fashion. “I have a good mind for science. I can tell you the square feet of floor space in a building from counting the windows. On Broadway, that naked waterfall, you know…” Mrs. Norris nodded, remembering the display. “I have figured out how many times the same water goes over it every night. Oh-h-h, and I’ve written books—just lovely stories about the world when it was gracious, and people could talk to each other even if one of them wasn’t one of those psychiatrists.”

  What an extraordinary woman!

  “But who would read stories like that nowadays?” She cast a sidelong glance at Mrs. Norris.

  “I would!” Mrs. Norris said.

  “Bless you, my dear, I knew that the moment I looked into your face!” She cocked her head, as a bird does at a strange sound. “Do you happen to know what time it is?”

  Mrs. Norris looked at her wrist watch. The woman leaned close to look also. “A Gruen is a lovely watch,” she said. She could see like a mantis.

  “It’s time I was going,” Mrs. Norris said. “It’s eleven-thirty.”

  “Oh, and time for me, too. I’ve been promised a job today.”

  “Where?” asked Mrs. Norris, which was quite unlike her, but the word had spurted out in her surprise.

  “It would degrade me to tell you,” the stranger said, and her eyes fluttered.

  Mrs. Norris could feel the flush in her face. She almost toppled her new, flowered hat, fanning herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was rude of me to ask.”

  “Would you like to buy me a little lunch?” the woman asked brazenly.

  Mrs. Norris got to her feet. “All right,” she said, having been caught fairly at a vulnerable moment. “There’s a cafeteria across the street. I often go there myself for a bowl of soup. Come along.”

  The woman had risen with her, but her face had gone awry. Mrs. Norris supposed that at this point she was always bought off—she was not the most appetizing of sights to share a luncheon table with. But Mrs. Norris led the way down the steps at a good pace. She did not begrudge the meal, but she would begrudge the price of it if it were not spent on a meal.

  “Wait, madam. I can’t keep up with you,” the woman wailed.

  Mrs. Norris had to stop anyway to tie the blessed shoelace.

  Her guest picked at the food, both her taste and her gab dried up in captivity. “It’s a bit rich for my stomach,” she complained when Mrs. Norris chid
ed her.

  Mrs. Norris sipped her tea. Then something strange happened: the cup trembled in her hand. At the same instant there was a clatter of dishes, the crash of glass, the screams of women, and the sense almost, more than the sound, of an explosion. Mrs. Norris’s eyes met those of the woman’s across from her. They were aglow as a child’s with excitement, and she grinned like a quarter moon.

  Outside, people began to run across the street toward the library. Mrs. Norris could hear the blast of police whistles, and she stretched her neck, hoping to see better. “Eat up and we’ll go,” she urged.

  “Oh, I couldn’t eat now and with all this commotion.”

  “Then leave it.”

  Once in the street Mrs. Norris was instantly the prisoner of the crowd, running with it as if she were treading water, frighteningly, unable to turn aside or stem the tide. And lost at once her frail companion, cast apart either by weight or wisdom. Mrs. Norris took in enough breath for a scream which she let go with a piper’s force. It made room for her where there had been none before, and from then on she screamed her way to the fore of the crowd.

  “Stand back! There’s nobody hurt but there will be!” a policeman shouted. Sirens wailed the approach of police reinforcements. Meanwhile, two or three patrolmen were joined by a few able-bodied passers-by to make a human cordon across the library steps.

  “It blew the stone bench fifty feet in the air,” Mrs. Norris heard a man say.

  “The stone bench?” she cried out. “Why, I was just sitting on it!”

  “Then you’ve got a hard bottom, lady,” a policeman growled. He and a companion were trying to hold on to a young man.

  Their prisoner gave a twist and came face to face with Mrs. Norris. “That’s the woman,” he shouted. “That’s the one I’m trying to tell you about. Let go of me and ask her!”

  A policeman looked at her. “This one with the flowers on her hat?”

  “That’s the one! She looked at her watch, got up and left the package, then ran down the steps, and the next thing…”

  “Got up and left what, young man?” Mrs. Norris interrupted.

  “The box under the bench,” the young man said, but to one of the officers.

  “A box under the bench?” Mrs. Norris repeated.

  “How come you were watching her?” the officer said.

  “I wasn’t especially. I was smoking a cigarette…”

  “Do you work in the library?”

  No doubt he answered, but Mrs. Norris’s attention was suddenly distracted, and by what seemed like half the police force of New York City.

  “I have a friend, Jasper Tully, in the District Attorney’s office,” she declared sternly.

  “That’s fine, lady,” a big sergeant said. “We’ll take a ride down there right now.” Then he bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Keep the steps clear till the Bomb Squad gets here.”

  In Jasper Tully’s office, Mrs. Norris tried to tell her interrogators about the strange little woman. But she knew from the start that they were going to pay very little attention to her story. Their long experience with panhandlers had run so true to pattern that they would not admit to any exception.

  And yet Mrs. Norris felt sure she had encountered the exception. For example, she had been cleverly diverted by the woman when she might have seen the package. The woman had put her foot down on nothing—Mrs. Norris was sure of that. She remembered having looked down at her shoelace, and she would have seen a coin had there been one at her feet—Mrs. Norris was a woman who knew the color of money. Oh, it was a clever lass, that other one, and there was a fair amount of crazy hate in her. Mrs. Norris was unlikely to forget the venom she had been so ready to spew on the Irish.

  She tried to tell them. But nobody had to button Annie Norris’s lips twice. It was not long until they wished Jasper Tully a widower’s luck with her, and went back themselves to the scene of the blast.

  Mr. Tully offered to take her home.

  “No, I think I’ll walk and cogitate, thank you,” she said.

  “Jimmie gives you too much time off,” Tully muttered. He was on close terms with her employer.

  “He gives me the time I take.”

  “Is he in town now?”

  “He is, or will be tonight. He’ll be going full dress to the theater. It’s an opening night.”

  “Aren’t you going yourself?”

  Mrs. Norris gave it a second’s thought. “I might,” she said.

  The detective took a card from his pocket and wrote down a telephone number. “You can reach me through this at all hours,” he said. “That’s in case your cogitating gets you into any more trouble.”

  When he had taken her to the office door, Mrs. Norris looked up to his melancholy face. “Who was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?”

  Tully rubbed his chin. “She wasn’t a saint exactly, but I think she was a living person…How the hell would I know? I was born in the Bronx!” A second later he added, “There was a play about her, wasn’t there?”

  “There was,” said Mrs. Norris. “I’m glad to see you’re not as ignorant as you make yourself out to be.”

  “Just be sure you’re as smart as you think you are,” Tully said, “if you’re off to tackle a policeman’s job again.”

  He had no faith in her, Mrs. Norris thought, or he wouldn’t let her do it.

  All afternoon she went over the morning’s incidents in her mind. As soon as Mr. Jarvis left the apartment for dinner and the theater, she went downtown herself. The evening papers were full of the bombing, calling it the work of a madman. The mechanism had been made up of clock parts, and the detonating device was something as simple as a pin. It was thought possibly to have been a hatpin.

  Well!

  And there was not a mention of her in any account. The police were obviously ashamed of themselves.

  Mrs. Norris took as her place of departure Forty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue. Turning her back on the waterfall atop the Broadway building, she walked toward Shubert Alley. Anyone who could even guess at the number of times the same water went over the dam must have looked at it at least as often. And Cathleen Ni Houlihan—no stranger to the theater had plucked that name out of the air.

  The beggars were out in droves: the blind, the lame, and the halt. And there were those with tin cups who could read the date in a dead man’s eye.

  Mrs. Norris was early, and a good thing she was. Sightseers were already congesting the sidewalk in front of the theater. New York might be the biggest city in the world, but to lovers of the stage a few square feet of it was world enough on an opening night.

  She watched from across the street for five minutes, then ten, with the crowd swelling and her own hopes dwindling. Then down the street from Eighth Avenue, with a sort of unperturbed haste, came the little beggar-woman. She wore the same hat, the same ragged coat and carried the same beaded purse.

  And she also carried a box about six inches by six which she carefully set down on the steps of a fire exit.

  Mrs. Norris plunged across the street and paused again, watching the beggar, fascinated in spite of herself. Round and round one woman she walked, looking her up and down, and then she scouted another. The women themselves were well-dressed out-of-towners by their looks, who had come to gape at the celebrated first-nighters now beginning to arrive. When the little panhandler had made her choice of victims, she said, and distinctly enough for Mrs. Norris to hear:

  “That’s Mrs. Vanderhoff arriving now. Lovely isn’t she? Oh, dear, that’s not her husband with her. Why, that’s Johnson Tree—the oil man! You’re not from Texas, are you, dear?”

  Mrs. Norris glanced at the arrivals. It was her own Mr. Jarvis and his friend. A Texas oil man indeed! The woman made up her stories to the fit of her victims! She was an artist at it.

  Mrs. Norris edged close to the building and bent down to examine the box. She thought she could hear a rhythmic sound. She could, she realized—her own heartbeat.

  “Leave that box alon
e!”

  Mrs. Norris obeyed, but not before she had touched, had actually moved, the box. It was empty, or at least as light as a dream, and the woman had not recognized her. She was too busy spinning a tale. Mrs. Norris waited it out. The woman finally asked for money and got it. She actually got paper money! Then she came for the box.

  “Remember me?” Mrs. Norris said.

  The woman cocked her head and looked at her. “Should I?”

  “This morning on the Public Library steps,” Mrs. Norris prompted.

  The wizened face brightened. “But of course! Oh, and there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I saw you speaking to my young gentleman friend—you know, in all that excitement?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Norris said, remembering the young man who had pointed her out to the police.

  “Isn’t he a lovely young man? And to have had such misfortune.”

  “Lovely,” Mrs. Norris agreed.

  “You know, he had a scholarship to study atomic science and those people did him out of it.”

  “Those people?”

  “All day long you can see them going in and out, in and out, carting books by the armful. Some of them have beards. False, you know. And those thick glasses—I ask you, who would be fooled by them? Spies! Traitors! And they can get as many books as they want.”

  “Oh, those people,” Mrs. Norris said understanding.

  “And my poor young friend. They won’t even give him a library card, and after I wrote him such a nice reference.”

  “Do you know where he lives?” Mrs. Norris said as casually as she could.

  “No. But I know where he works. He fixes watches for a jeweler on Forty-seventh Street. I walked by there once and saw him working in the window. If you wait here for me, I’ll walk over and show you the place tonight. He’s not there now, of course, but I’m sure he’ll be there in the morning. I hope you can help him.”

  “I’ll try,” Mrs. Norris said. A watchmaker.