Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  Oh, I had no one to stand at my shoulder and say in my ear, “A year from now, six months from now, it will still hurt perhaps when you remember her, but you won’t remember her constantly all day long or all through the night; days will have color and nights will have dawns. And a year is such a small part of a lifetime — take a sporting chance and stick it out!” And if I had had, I wouldn’t have believed them anyway, would have thrown the lie in their teeth. I was so sure that all my life from now on was going to be like tonight. So I made up my mind and I lifted my hand and I knocked on the glass.

  “Never mind about the station,” I said. “Take me back to 55th Street again.”

  And I wasn’t going back for my grip, I was going back to get what was waiting for me. And if nothing was waiting for me yet, why I was going to look it up myself. I was the coward, not the brave guy — I didn’t have the stuff in me, the starch, the sand, to face all those hours and weeks and months feeling the way I did: heartbroken, weary, alone, and bereft. This way was much quicker and easier.

  When we got back to the door, I simply left him without a word and walked into the lobby. I already felt much calmer than I had at any time since earlier in the day. I even felt calmer than when I still thought she and I were going to make our getaway together. I had been all worked up with anticipation then. This was a soothing lassitude, on the contrary, that almost made me want to drop down in the first comfortable chair that came along and wait for things to turn up.

  The doorman looked at me in surprise; evidently he had still thought I was upstairs all this time. “Why, I didn’t see you come down in the ele—!” he started to say to me.

  “Phone for the police,” I interrupted laconically, stepping into the car. “Send them up to Miss Pascal’s apartment. I’ll be up there.” And I motioned the openmouthed operator to go ahead.

  “Anything wrong, sir?” he finally managed to articulate.

  “What’s that of your business?” I told him placidly.

  He kept the car standing there with the door open after he had let me off, dying to get a look in after I opened the door, I suppose. “Go on down, will you!” I snarled. “What are you standing there for? There’s nothing to see.”

  With which he reluctantly cut himself off from me behind the panel and was gone.

  I unlocked the door and went in once more, leaving it wide open so that that creepy feeling of being alone in there wouldn’t come back. I turned a chair around so that it faced away from her, sat down in it, lit a cigarette, and directed my gaze out through the open door upon the elevator door opposite, which was in a direct line from where I was sitting. Something kept trying to pull my head around in the other direction; I had to stiffen the muscles of my neck to resist it. I kept praying I could hold out until they came, and not give in and look. “Bernice,” I murmured, “what more do you want of me? Let me be.”

  When I was in the act of lighting a fresh cigarette from the stump of the old, they finally got there. They came filing across the corridor directly toward me, getting bigger and bigger all the time as they got nearer, while the chair and I seemed to grow smaller and smaller. As they entered the living room from the foyer, all I could see any more were their huge feet and the mammoth legs of their trousers. If they didn’t stop soon, they’d go over me, and I’d be crushed under their gigantic soles — my head sort of rolled over on my shoulder, and then I pulled it back again and everything was the right size once more.

  “She dead?” one of them said to me, taking his eyes off the floor.

  “Long time now,” I answered.

  “You do it?” the same one said. He seemed to be asking the questions to satisfy his own personal curiosity, just as one man will go up to another on a street corner where a crowd has collected and ask what the trouble is. Others were busying themselves with her, I could tell without turning around; he seemed to have nothing to do for a minute, hence his interrogation of me.

  “There she is,” I said listlessly, “and here I am. What more do you want?”

  “Plenty,” he said, “you’re talking to an officer, and don’t forget it!” And he sent his fist hurtling into the side of my face. There was a flash of fire before my eyes, and I went over on the floor, chair and all. The pain was gone an instant after the blow, and it felt so lazy, so effortless, lying there prone like that, that I wanted to let my eyes close and not lift a finger toward getting up again. But the thought that she was on the floor too, somewhere just a little in back of me, made me come to and pick myself up again. I left the chair where it was.

  “Pick it up,” he ordered truculently, “and next time don’t get so wise!”

  I set it on its feet again and looked at him inquiringly.

  “Siddown,” he thundered. “We’re coinin’ to you!”

  But it seemed to take them hours to do so. People kept coming in and coming in, some in uniform and some without, some in white coats, some carrying satchels — all their attention was focused on her. Once or twice I dared to turn and look, because there were so many of them around her that I couldn’t see her any more — bending over her, squatting down on their haunches, pawing her, doing things that I couldn’t understand. A man carrying a tripod came in at one time and set it up just inside the door, and they all drew back from her, out of the way, and there was a flash of diamond-white light and a puff of smoke. Then he went even nearer her, almost stood directly above her, and there was another flash and another puff. Then he picked up the tripod and went out. I remember thinking vaguely that he must be a reporter, but it seems not, because later another man with a tripod came out of the emergency-staircase door, and the moment they saw him, two of them rushed out and came to blows with him. They broke the tripod, flung him into the elevator, and he was taken downstairs.

  About midnight or one in the morning, they took me into Bernice’s bedroom and shut the door. The ones in uniform seemed to be playing a minor part by this time. There was one of them standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him, but all the others in the room were without uniforms. One of them had turned Bernice’s vanity table into a desk and was sitting beside it writing on a thick stenographic pad. The three pieces of baggage were gone from underneath it.

  “Siddown!” I was told.

  I sat down and leaned forward over my knees.

  When they were through looking at me — and only because I was past caring about anything any more was I able to bear the awful, baleful scrutiny from all sides — they began to ask me questions. Or rather one in particular did. Sometimes, during all this, he’d get up as though he were through, and I’d think he had left the room, only to have him suddenly ask me something over my shoulder.

  “Your name’s Wade,” they told me. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “About a month, I guess.”

  “What’d you do it for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Two or three of them advanced on me threateningly. “What’d you do it for?” he roared a second time.

  “Because I loved her.”

  The blow I got this time was from the back; I stumbled forward out of the chair, went down on both hands and struck my head against the edge of the thick glass slab that covered the vanity table. It opened the skin a little above one eye.

  “Get up; you’re not hurt,” he informed me. “Now, are you gonna answer or aren’t you! Wait a minute,” he interrupted himself, “lemme ask you something else; where were you going with her tonight?”

  “California.” I reached in my pocket, took out the tickets, and passed them to him.

  When he was through looking at them he said, “Why were you going out there?”

  “To live,” I said simply.

  He got up and went away; I kept looking at the place he had just been sitting in. Suddenly he whipped out from somewhere in back of me, “Well, if she was going with you, what’d you do it for?”


  “ ’Cause she backed out at the last minute,” I said instantly, without turning around.

  “Now we’re gettin’ some place,” he remarked to the others, and came around in front of me and sat down again.

  Most of the questions after that were easy to answer; all I had to keep remembering was that I had done it because she had changed her mind at the very last and refused to go with me — everything followed from that quite naturally. Toward the end, possibly because I was answering just as they seemed to want me to, they even became less threatening, dropped their voices a pitch or two.

  Then at the very last, when it all seemed clear sailing, everything went wrong again. He had just told me that they were going to draw up a confession then and there and have me sign it, and had already ordered the policeman to take me into the other room and hold me there until it was ready — when he motioned me back again to where I had been sitting and said, “Suppose you run through it in your own words; take this down, George, and don’t miss anything.” Then to me again, “All right — you came up here a little after nine, and you found her all packed and ready for you. And then she said she wasn’t going. Now go on from there.”

  I was so tired already; I couldn’t understand what more they wanted! I’d already said I’d done it; over and over I’d said I’d done it. I’d always thought they only questioned you like this when you denied a thing, not when you admitted it. I swallowed to moisten my throat, and said: “She said she wasn’t going. She said I didn’t have enough money. I begged her and she wouldn’t listen to me—” And right while I was speaking, I kept thinking, “Where am I going to say I got the gun? What am I going to say I did with it afterward?” So far, I noticed, they hadn’t asked me a word about that. “So then I told her I was going alone. She said, all right, go ahead. So I went downstairs by the emergency staircase; my bag was in the lobby and the doorman was outside in front of the house. He didn’t see me. I opened the bag and took the gun out. I went running all the way up the stairs again. I had her key, and I opened the door and went in again. I asked her for the last time if she would come with me, and she said no, so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”

  I noticed that they’d all grown very quiet and were staring at me curiously; I saw one or two of them exchange looks with one another.

  “How many bullets did you give her?” the man before me asked brutally.

  Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why hadn’t I taken a look the whole time I was alone with her, and noticed?

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “I think I fired two or three times—”

  The man before me turned around and said, “You got that, George?”

  “That’s no good,” someone else expostulated. “Why don’t you find out what he’s up to!”

  “You lemme do this my own way, Dowlan!” he bellowed back, and glared at him to silence him. “I know what I’m doing!” I heard the door open and shut behind me, and he looked up, over and beyond me, and said, “You bring it with you? Good! Give it to George here.” And a typewriter of the portable variety was brought forward and placed on the vanity table. After which they ordered the policeman to take me outside to the other room, “until we tell you to bring him back again.”

  No sooner had the door closed after me than I heard the keys of the typewriter begin to click at breakneck speed. The apartment door still stood wide open, but there was a policeman standing before it, and another one opposite him mounting guard over the elevator door. In the living room itself, a man was going around examining the knobs on the doors and other odds and ends, but evidently not in a professional capacity, for he had no magnifying glass. Yet when he turned my way, I saw that he had some sort of a little thing screwed into his eye. Another was sitting before a drawer that had been removed bodily from some article of furniture and going painstakingly through a cloud of papers it contained. Most of them looked like bills from a distance. She was gone now; she had evidently been taken away while I was inside. It made things a little more bearable for me. I asked the policeman to let me go to the bathroom, and the answer I got was more unpleasant than amusing. I sat down in the chair I had occupied originally.

  The typewriter stopped after awhile, and you could hear their voices in the other room, but not what they were saying. I started to light a cigarette, and the policeman snarled, “Who told you to go ahead and smoke?”

  The man who had been looking at the doorknobs and things lifted his head and said, “Let him smoke, Sheehan. He hasn’t long to do it in.”

  “And it won’t be smoker’s heart that’ll stop him, either,” the policeman agreed.

  The typewriter recommenced all at once, as though some point that had momentarily clogged its progress had just been settled. Then, a little while after that, a bulb in one of the lamps burnt out, from overuse no doubt, and went dark.

  “She had a nice place here,” the policeman remarked thoughtfully.

  “Did you ever know one that didn’t?” the man going over the bills snapped.

  I noticed for the first time that the other one, the doorknob fellow, was no longer there, had gone without my even realizing it. But I was so tired; everything was bathed in a mist!

  The typewriter stopped again. Then almost at once, this second time, the bedroom door opened, and they motioned to the policeman with their heads.

  He brought me in again. “Lock the door,” the one who had asked me most of the questions the time before ordered. The room was already full of smoke; Bernice’s familiar things looked funny through it. Between that and the state my eyes were in, I could hardly see their faces straight anymore.

  “Read him what you got there, George,” I heard him say. “His own words. From where she told him she wasn’t going with him.”

  The man who had been using the vanity table for a desk all along began to read some typed sheets aloud. “—so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”

  When he was through, the other one gave me a crafty sort of a smile and said, with remarkable (for him) moderation, “You admit you done it in just that way, do you? And you’re ready to sign what he just read to you, are you?”

  “Yes,” I said dully.

  Someone else said something to him under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, whereupon he whirled around fiercely and burst out: “Tell that to your grandmother! He’s as sane as I am! He’s yellow, that’s what’s the matter with him!”

  Then turning back to me, again with unwonted restraint, he continued, “Suppose we were to make a few changes in that — just a coupla things here and there — suppose you were too excited to remember everything just the way it happened, and we were to sort of, now, help it along for you — would you still sign it?”

  “I told you I did it,” I murmured, “and I’ll sign anything you want me to, any way you put it.”

  He seemed almost more surprised than gratified for a moment, but he didn’t waste any time. The man at the desk handed him several typed sheets: whether they were the same ones he had read or not I couldn’t tell. He patted them into shape and put them down beside him without looking at them, took a fountain pen out of his pocket and held it toward me, saying: “All right, then sign this! This is the way it really happened.”

  I took the pen from him, wrote my name where he showed me to on the paper he handed me, and then passed both back to him — or rather the pen alone, for he had never taken his hand from the paper for an instant.

  “That’s that!” he said, folding the papers and inserting them into the inside pocket of his coat with an air of ponderous satisfaction. “You didn’t shoot her; you strangled her to death with your hands, like we found her!” And giving those around him the wink, he added, “Now bring on your lawyers!”

  They asked me a few desultory questions after that, but more in the manner of horseplay than a serious attempt to find out anything further. Such as: Had I really forgotten I had choked her and imagined
I had shot her, or had I deliberately invented the story about running down the staircase and getting a gun out of my grip? And if so, why?

  “I don’t know why,” I said in a half-audible voice. “Maybe because I’m romantic. Maybe because it’s the first time I ever did a thing like this, and I wanted to make it sound better than it really was.” And to myself I added, “Or maybe because I didn’t do it at all in the first place.”

  I no longer knew whether I had or hadn’t; I was no longer sure. I had been telling them I had for so long that it seemed to me I must have after all. I found myself actually forgetting that I hadn’t seen her at all from the moment I left her at five in the afternoon to get the tickets until the time I found her lying on the floor — found myself actually beginning to believe that I had found her still alive, had spoken to her when I came back at nine. It was literally with surprise that I at last stopped short and reminded myself, “But she was already gone when you got back; somebody else must have done it!”

  Oh, I no longer knew whether I was sane or insane, awake or dreaming: no longer cared! All I knew was, every breath I drew was hellfire, every minute that passed was a crucifixion.

  It was growing lighter outside the windows now, like so many times when I had been up in this room with her. I knew just where the first splashes of pearl and pink were going to hit against the wall; knew just at what point they would begin to spread like blisters and reach upward toward the ceiling and downward toward the floor. But just before it all began, they clicked a steel ring over my wrist and at last made ready to depart.