Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  As they brought me out of the bedroom into the living room, I turned and asked if I couldn’t go to the bathroom. So the one whose wrist was joined to mine unwillingly turned aside and stood at my shoulder for a minute. After that they took me out to the elevator — Bernice’s apartment vanished forever behind the vertical metal trap — and I stood in the exact middle of all of them, like someone popular, like someone surrounded by all his friends, as we went down to the street.

  Even at that unearthly hour, a handful of ghouls had gathered around the street door, or maybe they had been standing there all night like that, I don’t know — and there was another one of those starlike flashes and puffs of smoke, because it was still dim out on the street. But this time the men with me didn’t attempt to break the camera or drive the perpetrator away. Then, just as they were putting me in a car at the curb, another diversion occurred; I heard a protesting, argumentative voice somewhere in back of me. “I been waitin’ all night,” it said, “they wouldn’t even lemme go in the lobby! He owes me twenty-four dollars, and six more for overtime—” I heard them all laughing, and I turned and saw a man standing there, pale in the face and sweating with anxiety. “He rode all the way down to Gran’ Central with me—” he said. Meanwhile there was another one of those skyrocket flashes, followed by a tart smell, so close to me this time that I jumped and collided against the man I was manacled to. But by its light I recognized the protesting individual as the cabdriver I had hired at one time or another last night and then left standing before the door — just when, I wasn’t sure, or why, or whether I really hadn’t paid him as he said.

  The man with me flicked me on the arm and said humorously, “Y’got any money on you?”

  “Tell him to get a cop and have me pinched,” I answered stonily, and the irony of saying such a thing at such a time only dawned on me after I’d heard the roar of appreciation that went up on all sides. I didn’t smile.

  They ushered me in the car and sat on each side of me, and we drove off down the streets of New York in the beginning of the morning light, with batches of lights going out everywhere, like that single bulb in Bernice’s living room had gone out a while back. But what was dawn and the start of the day for every one else was dusk and the ending of it for me.

  But if it was dusk, and it was the end of my day, it seemed to go on forever and forever; the night that I prayed and yearned incessantly for seemed never to begin. Sometimes I used to wonder if what I had mistaken for an indictment hadn’t really been my trial after all, and I had been sentenced to life imprisonment without realizing it. I used to go into a cold sweat whenever it occurred to me that I might get life or twenty years instead of what I wanted. “Gee, it’s got to be that!” I moaned, walking back and forth. “It’s little enough to ask for! Those that don’t want it always get it — why shouldn’t I?”

  Maxine came to see me — it seemed long afterward, but it may have only been a few days; all I know is, they brought me out one time, and she was on the other side of a wire screen. And she looked so bad, so old, so forlorn — it almost seemed I must be visiting her, and not she me.

  “Why did you leave me that night?” she said tenderly. “This wouldn’t have happened to you—”

  “How is it out today?” I said. “Very warm, or is it cooler than it was before?”

  She saw what I meant, so she answered, “It’s pretty warm, warmer than it was yesterday—”

  “Where do you live now, Maxine?” I said. “In the same place?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve been in the hospital; I just got out yesterday, that’s why I couldn’t come to you any sooner.”

  “Feeling all right now?” I asked, letting my eyes stray around vacantly.

  “Yes,” she said readily, “it was just the suddenness of the thing, on top of everything else—” Then she went on, “I have a lawyer for you; he’ll help you out of this.”

  “I don’t want a lawyer,” I said.

  “I want you to tell him everything, when he comes to see you,” she pleaded vibrantly. “He’s the best I could get hold of; it’s not too late yet — that awful confession, what did they do, grill it out of you? — there’s still every chance in the world, if you—”

  “All I want,” I told her. “is to get it over with.”

  “Wade, for my sake, if not your own,” she begged. “Won’t you give me this one last break? It’s taken every cent I had—”

  “No, Maxine, no! I want to go!”

  “Wade, darling,” she groaned, “for Bernice’s sake, then. She wouldn’t want you, she wouldn’t want any one to have this happen — she was too nice a girl!”

  “Bernice is gone,” I answered. “There isn’t any more Bernice.”

  “Wade, you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t! You’re lying your very life away!”

  “I did it, Maxine!” I shouted passionately at her at last. “I choked her to death with my own hands! Now will you believe me? Now will you go away and leave me alone?”

  “God forgive you for what you’re doing to the two of us!” was the last thing she said.

  The lawyer’s name was Berenson. He came to see me the next day, and scowl as I would that I didn’t want to see any one, wouldn’t leave my cell I was brought in to him. It wasn’t important enough one way or the other, after all, for me to dig my heels between the boards of the floor and put up a physical struggle about.

  “Your poor wife,” one of the first things he said to me was, “sold the very wedding ring off her finger, sold her radio, sold everything, to be able to get someone’s services in your defense. At that, the money she came to me with, wouldn’t have paid for the first half-hour’s conference we had. I have it put aside in my safe right now, and she’s welcome to it back the day the trial ends — no matter what the outcome. Now believe that or not. Wade, whichever you prefer!”

  “I’d believe anything these days,” I told him.

  “I’ve taken this case over,” he said, “because I’m interested in it — because I have a hunch it’s going to turn out to be the biggest case in years — and because I think I can squeeze enough prestige out of it before I’m through to last me the rest of my career. Do you get me?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. Y’better lay off it, if it’s prestige you’re after, because you’ve got a client that doesn’t want to be defended and a case that can’t be won!”

  “Why can’t it?” he snapped. “You didn’t kill her!”

  “Didn’t I? I say I did,” I said sullenly. “How do you know I didn’t?”

  “You were all the way down at Grand Central in a cab the first time.” he said, “and you turned around and went back there. If you’d done it, nothing could have gotten you within a mile of that place that night!”

  “Why not?” I decided. “I couldn’t get away with it, that was all.”

  “You would have gone to the nearest police station, then — not to the very room she was lying in, alone. Don’t try to tell me; I ought to know a little about human nature by now!”

  “All right, Mr. Berenson,” I said, “build up your beautiful case! Build it sky-high! And when you’ve got it all spic and span and foolproof, I’m going to stand up there in the stand just the same and tell the world I killed Bernice Pascal!”

  “You think you’re the kingpin in this, don’t you, Wade!” he told me scathingly. “You think the whole case is centered around you and whether you’re guilty or whether you’re not! Well, let me tell you, my dear boy, you’re not as important in this affair as that very colored girl she had working for her — you’re nothing more than the sucker that’s taking the rap!” He opened a dull silver cigarette case and held it toward me with the contemptuous air of some one feeding peanuts to a rather smelly animal in the zoo. “You loved her, didn’t you?” he said.

  In thinking it over after he’d gone, I realized that it was at about this point I began to fall for him.

  “Maybe I didn’t!” I assented wistfully.
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br />   “Your wife told me as much,” he went on. “She had an idea that that might be the reason for your whole fool attitude from the time of the arrest. Pascal’s gone, so you don’t give a damn one way or the other now.”

  “Which is just about the size of it,” I said stiffly, “and my own privilege in the bargain.”

  “Fair enough,” he agreed, “but it makes a pretty poor showing, when you come right down to it. Leaving yourself out of it altogether, you’re letting the real guys that killed the woman you love get away with murder. You don’t seem to feel that you owe that much to her — to get busy and settle accounts for her. In other words, Wade, you may be standing up and telling the world that you killed her — but what you’re telling yourself, and her, is that she’s not worth avenging! That she deserves what she got!”

  “God knows that isn’t true!” I burst out. “I’d choke the rats that did it with my own hands if I only knew who they—”

  Then I knew by the smile on his face that I had told him I hadn’t done it.

  “I’m taking the case, Wade,” he let me know. “I mayn’t be able to keep you out of the chair, but at least I’ll keep you out of the witness box!”

  But I went back to the cell shaking my head and thinking, “What good is it if he does get the right guys? What good is it if I do get even for her? What good is anything? Will it bring her back?”

  I must have been a funny client, though! After that first day, I told Berenson anything he wanted to know, didn’t hold back a thing — and yet never again, after that first slip of the tongue, would I admit I hadn’t done it. I noticed he didn’t waste much time arguing out that point with me (and to me it seemed all that mattered in the whole thing: whether I said I did do it or said I didn’t do it) but seemed more interested in a whole lot of other things, side issues like the party at Jerry’s that Saturday night, and the way Bernice had once begged me to stop seeing her, and the man that had answered her phone the night I had called her from the restaurant, and the way I had met Marion on the street and she had had a spasm of jealousy over what I told her, and so on.

  Sometimes I would tell him things that it seemed to me he should have gone into ecstasies over, should have congratulated me on remembering, and he would brush them impatiently aside and remark, “That’s not a bit of good to me.” And then again, he would suddenly flap his wings and lose feathers all over the room about some trivial detail that didn’t have the utmost bearing on the case, as far as I could see. I used to wonder sometimes if he was really a good lawyer.

  For instance, during one of our talks I suddenly recalled how I had walked out of Bernice’s place the first night I met her, wearing somebody else’s hat by mistake. Not only that, but by some quirk of memory the size and make of it even came back to me! I at once gave him the dope on it, afraid I might forget all about it again. “Y’better put that down,” I advised, “size 6⅜! And inside the hatband it said Boulevard des Capucines!” And waited for him to fall all over me when he heard it. My life was pretty colorless, I guess.

  All he said was, “Don’t let’s waste time. Wade; I’m not running the fashion column for men in the theater programs.” And then, on the other hand, one time when I was trying to recall, more for my own morbid satisfaction than his benefit, what my last words to her had been when I left there the afternoon it happened, I recollected that they hadn’t been to her at all, but to Tenacity, who had stopped me on my way out to ask me if Bernice was “fixing to fire her, or what?” He no sooner heard that than he stopped me then and there and demanded excitedly, “Why didn’t you tell me that before? That the colored girl was still in the place when you left! I’ve had a feeling all along that she’d be our trump card in this!”

  I didn’t follow him, and gave him a look that told him so.

  “I’d like to bet,” he said, slapping his knee, “that she was drawing pay from other sources besides the wages Pascal paid her!”

  I still didn’t get him but no longer bothered signaling the fact. “I read in one of the tabs,” I said, “that they had her down at headquarters the day after, questioning her. I think they’re going to use her as a witness against me—”

  “Let me get my hands on her!” he said viciously. “I’ll find out who Pascal’s friends were!”

  “Anyway, she left the place herself five minutes after I did that afternoon,” I remarked indifferently. “The doorman and the elevator man both backed her up on that, according to what the paper—”

  “Oh, her alibi’s as good as gold,” he interrupted caustically. “A little too good, if you want to know the way I feel about it. She wasn’t satisfied with asking the doorman what time it was — she had to let her Ingersoll slip out of her hand while she was pretending to wind it and break the crystal on the floor, and then make some remark about that meaning bad luck, a death in the house or something to that effect. And the doorman, being colored himself, wasn’t likely to forget that when the time came. Then on top of that, as though that weren’t enough, she conveniently remembered some phone message Pascal had asked her to deliver, and used the downstairs phone — as though she couldn’t have thought of that while she was still upstairs!”

  “Oh, that must’ve been to me,” I said reflectively and then again, “No, that’s right, it was a man, and it didn’t come until quarter to—”

  “It wasn’t to you at all,” he said sourly. “I got the whole story. It was to some girlfriend of Pascal’s, and the call never went through because she’d been dispossessed for having too many brawls in her place. This clever colored wench has to throw a fit of giggling when she hears that, pretending it struck her so funny, and repeat the whole thing to the doorman word for word. Take it from me, she knew what was coming and wanted to impress every one with the fact that she was going home at quarter to five. I’d like to bet that other days no one even saw her come and go!”

  I remembered something then and told him: “Wait a minute, you’ve got the whole thing wrong. That wasn’t the time she made that call — she’d already made it upstairs right in front of me and Bernice. Bernice called her in the room specially for that, and I remember she said she didn’t have to look the number up; she knew it by heart. And that was when they told her they were dispossessed — not down in the lobby at all.”

  “Well, it’s damn queer, then,” he said, “that it should strike her so funny fifteen floors below that she has to break out laughing all over the place until the doorman himself told her not to make so much noise; she’d get him in trouble. I never yet heard of any colored Englishwomen, did you?”

  “Maybe she’s from the British West Indies,” I suggested unwittingly.

  He gave me an indescribable look and shook his head to himself. “You never killed Bernice Pascal,” he said in a low voice. I turned my face aside with sharp impatience. “No, it’s ten to one that what she did downstairs, the coon I mean,” he went on, “was step over to the phone and send out the tip-off that Pascal was packing and getting ready to skip out of New York that night. And then went over to the doorman and pretended that the call she had just made was the first one, the one you heard her make upstairs. Just let her take the stand — I’ll get it out of her. They’ll wish they had paid her fare to California, whoever they are!”

  I was so little interested, however, in what his plans were, and in fact in the whole trial itself, that I didn’t even know what date had been set for it. I’d only glanced at a paper on two occasions since they’d brought me here, and as it nearly turned my stomach to see Bernice’s face splashed all over the pages in gummy ink — with words like “Butterfly” and “Slain Beauty” and “Queen of Hearts” written above it — and encounter column after column of a diary that I knew damn well she’d never written, I didn’t repeat the attempt. It was tough enough to have lost her without having to share her with the entire world.

  And Berenson, either because he had so much else on his mind that it never occurred to him or because he took it for granted that I a
lready knew, never said a word to me about it either. So the first I knew about when it was due to begin was the morning of the very day itself, when the turnkey suggested to me not unkindly that I “oughta take a shave for myself.”

  “Why?” I said, “the cement walls aren’t complaining, are they?”

  “They’ll be taking pictures of you today in court,” he said, “and you look like hell. You wanta make a good impression on the jury, don’t ya?”

  “Oh, is it today?” I said, and I went ahead and “took a shave for myself.” And I mean just that, for myself, and not for the jury or anybody else.

  And so it began — and all I did after that was sit there, day after day, and day after day. I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about most of the time. They’d bring me in each morning and sit me down — and I always sat in the same place — and then at noon they’d take me back again, and then early in the afternoon they’d bring me in again, and then late in the afternoon they’d take me out again. And the next day the whole dreary thing would start over again. All I did was go in and out of that room and sit there — with every one in the back of the room staring their eyes out at me.

  At the end of the first week, when I was confident the thing must be nearly over, I found out through Berenson that they’d only just gotten through picking out jurors. When he saw the look on my face, he said, “Wade, this is an interesting case; most men in your shoes would hug every delay!”

  He told me Maxine had been present every day. “Tell her to go on home!” I said harshly. “Hasn’t she got enough decency to stay away from here?”

  The second week it became a little more comprehensible; at least they stopped asking jurors what business they were in and whether they were opposed to capital punishment, and began to have a succession of people on the stand — who spoke of things more closely related to me. But presently I had heard the banal, monotonous story so often, from so many different angles, that I could have yelled my lungs out for mercy. In sheer self-defense I fell into the habit of staring hypnotically out of the nearest of the wide, tall windows. The sun came pouring in through them almost without exception during the whole of this time, and if I watched attentively enough, I could see little grains of dust floating around in it and making patterns. But at the end of one session Berenson took occasion to warn me against doing that. He said it made me seem callous, hard-boiled, would make a bad impression on the jury. “Oh, jury be damned!” I thought to myself wearily.