She Woke to Darkness

by Brett Halliday

  13.

  A congenitally frustrated Lothario, Avery Birk was feeling exceedingly well pleased with himself on this particular morning. He lay on his back on a wrinkled and soiled sheet covering a double bed on the third floor of a Village walk-up and contemplated the florid and erotic painting that covered the entire ceiling of the bedroom while he made little sucking sounds of satisfaction with thick lips and briefly considered the pleasures of sex.

  Avery Birk never failed to find voluptuous pleasure in contemplating the painting over his bed. It reminded him of the one complete and undiluted sexual triumph in his life. The artist had been a horsy female from the midwest who was, if possible, even more sexually frustrated than he. He had met her, luckily, only a few days after her arrival in New York from some village in Indiana where she had spent forty-two drab years waiting for her widowed mother to die and leave her a small legacy with which she could storm the artistic citadels of New York.

  A barren virgin, and bewildered by the wonder of it all, Avery Birk was the first male person in New York to appreciate her potentialities and to invite her to be seduced.

  She showed her appreciation by living with him for two weeks and then committing suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol. During those two weeks she painted the mural above the bed where she had first discovered sexual pleasure.

  This morning Avery was contemplating one of the shadowy nudes above him and thinking with pleasure how much she resembled Elsie Murray. A large part of the pleasure flowed from the degrading perversion being practiced by the nude. Elsie had been revolted by the painting the one time Avery had cunningly plied her with enough strongly spiked drinks to overcome her natural aversion of him and get her into his apartment.

  She had insulted him, by God, right here in his own bedroom when he tried to induce her to lie down just for a little rest.

  All right. So she’d made her bed and he hoped she liked it. Walking out of the banquet with that one-eyed bastard, Brett Halliday, last night. Where was she this morning? Dead, by God, and good enough for her.

  It had been disgusting, that’s what. Utterly disgusting to see how she fawned on the guy. What did he have that all the others in MWA who have tried to make her didn’t have? It wasn’t only himself, Avery told himself with sly pleasure. There had been plenty others to whom she’d given the brush-off. She was too good for all of them, though she’d never had a story published in her life.

  Until Halliday came along. Who in hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who’d written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.

  God! He must be almost forty, Avery Birk ruminated. Maybe that was one explanation for a girl like Elsie taking up with him. A man of that age couldn’t be very dangerous. With him, a girl might have her cake and eat it, too. That’s why she picked on him in the first place when there were so many younger and more virile men around to choose from.

  A loud knocking on the outer door interrupted Avery’s pleased musings. He scowled and lumbered out of bed, stood for a moment in faded cerise pajamas before going into the small stuffy living room to open the door.

  It would be the cops. They’d said for him to stay home and they’d be around to get a statement from him though he’d insisted over the phone he knew absolutely nothing about the case except that he’d seen the two of them go out together.

  He supposed he should have dressed more formally for their visit, but what did it matter? He was a writer, wasn’t he? A Bohemian. He had to live up to the Village’s reputation. The police expected this sort of thing. They’d suspect he wasn’t a real author if they found him all spruced up like a businessman.

  In his bare feet and with tousled hair, Avery Birk pulled the door open and was confronted by a tall man with a deeply lined face and wearing a Palm Beach suit and Panama hat.

  At least they had sent a detective to interview him, not some dumb cluck in uniform with no understanding of the artistic temperament.

  He stepped aside and said, “Come on in. I’m sort of hung over this morning, so I hope you’ll take me as I am.”

  “That’s all right,” said Shayne curtly. “I just want a little information.” He wrinkled his nose against the stench of stale cigarette butts, the musty, almost fetid odor of a small apartment whose windows were seldom opened and where fresh air was regarded as unwholesome.

  “I can’t tell you very much,” said Avery importantly. “Just what I reported over the telephone. Here. Sit down.” He pulled a pair of slacks and a sweated undershirt from the room’s only chair, and padded backward to a sofa covered with a garish pseudo-Navajo blanket. “Care for a drink? I think there’s some gin. And I know there’s a jug of muscatel.”

  Shayne said, “Thanks, no. We want everything you know about Elsie Murray.”

  “It isn’t much. I used to see her around. She was one of those girls who longed to be a writer but didn’t have much talent. They hang around us professionals. You get used to it when you’re well-known.” He yawned and smiled lasciviously. “It’s pleasant at first. Feeds one’s ego. Then you have to beat them off with a broom and they get to be a frightful bore.”

  “Where was she from?” demanded Shayne impatiently. “Who were her folks? What was her background?”

  “Christ, I don’t really know. Did she have folks… a background? One gets to thinking, you know, that girls like Elsie just spring out from under a rock. Sort of parthenogenesis, if that’s the word I want.”

  “All right.” Shayne concealed his rising irritation as best he could. “So you don’t really know anything about her. Tell me about last night. You claim you saw her leave with a man named Brett Halliday.”

  “That’s right. A fellow from out of town who horned in on our annual banquet. Oh, he had a right to be there, I guess. I believe he is a writer of sorts, though not a really big name in the field. Wears a black eyepatch, though they do say there’s nothing wrong with his eye and he simply does it to attract attention. That type.”

  “We know all about Halliday,” said Shayne impatiently. “We want information about Elsie Murray.”

  “Have they arrested Halliday?” asked Birk eagerly. “Does he deny being on the make for her all evening and buying the poor kid more drinks than she could handle? She does pass out sometimes, they say, and I presume…”

  “Who says she passes out sometimes?” demanded Shayne sharply.

  “I don’t know. I’ve heard it around. It was perfectly disgusting,” Birk went on warmly, “to see a guy like Halliday working his wiles on a nice girl like that. When he finally persuaded her to leave with him, I thought, ‘Oh, oh! Watch your step with that old goat, Elsie’.”

  “We’re not interested in what you thought. Just facts,” snapped Shayne. “Who would be able to tell us more about Elsie?”

  “Now you’re asking really intimate questions,” protested Birk with an assumption of coyness. “It wouldn’t be quite gentlemanly for me to answer, I think.”

  Shayne stood up. He moved two steps across the room and his face was set in hard lines. “I haven’t time to waste here. Where can I get the information I want?”

  “I’m a citizen and I have my rights. You can’t go around…”

  “The hell I can’t,” snarled Shayne. His open right hand struck Birk’s cheek loudly, slewed the heavy figure sideways on the sofa. “Start talking.”

  Avery Birk slunk away from him appalled at this show of violence. “I’ll report you,” he sputtered. “You can’t get away…” His voice ended in a high-pitched gurgle as Shayne leaned over and fastened the fingers of his left hand in the pajama collar and twisted it. He heaved Birk up to a sitting position and slapped him again.

  “Stop playing games.” His voice was low and hard and his eyes were frighteningly cold. “Where do I go to find out more about Elsie Murray?”

  Avery Birk wriggled desperately in his grasp, and tears of mortificatio
n ran down his cheeks. “Never in my life,” he sputtered, “Never in my whole life…”

  Shayne took a backward step and jerked him upright. He stood with right fist poised, a foot from Birk’s face. “You’ve got just two seconds to give me a name before I knock all your teeth down your throat so you’ll never speak again.”

  He meant it! Avery Birk knew he meant it. This was the most terrible injustice he had ever encountered. They should be thanking him instead of knocking him around. He was a hero, wasn’t he? If he hadn’t told them about Brett Halliday…

  He swayed back weakly and mumbled, “Try Lew Recker. He knew her best, I guess. He claimed they were sleeping together, though you never can tell about Lew. He’s always boasting…”

  Shayne dropped him disgustedly on the sofa where he cowered, covering his wet and bruised face with both hands.

  Shayne got out a pencil and wrote down the name. “Address?”

  Birk gave it to him. An apartment building on Madison in the forties.

  He didn’t hear Shayne go out. All he heard was the loud slam of the door behind the redhead, and he lay there weeping quietly and wondering in bewilderment why he was never appreciated… why things like this were always happening to him.

  14.

  When Shayne reached the address, it was apparent that Lew Recker was much more commercially successful as a writer than his colleague in the Village. Either that, or he had independent means to help out.

  It was a pleasant residential hotel, complete with doorman, nicely appointed lobby with dining room and cocktail lounge on one side. A fresh-skinned girl was at the switchboard, doubling as desk clerk and Information, and she looked doubtful, glancing up at the clock when Shayne asked for Mr. Recker.

  “I don’t like to disturb him so early. Not before noon unless it’s extremely important.”

  “It’s extremely important,” Shayne assured her.

  She remained doubtful. “Would you mind saying what it is? He does have a vile temper when he’s disturbed in the morning.” She smiled briefly and confidentially at the redhead. “Claims he’s writing, you know, and that I shatter his mood. Frankly, I think he probably sleeps most of the morning.”

  Shayne returned her smile, but said sternly, “This is police business. Give me his room number, if you wish, and I’ll be happy to do the disturbing myself. No reason he should know you gave it to me,” he added.

  She said, “I’d as soon he didn’t know. It’s five-eighteen.”

  Shayne thanked her and went to a bank of three elevators at the rear. A smartly uniformed lad took him up to the fifth floor, said, “Down the corridor to your left, sir,” when Shayne mentioned the number.

  The detective from Miami went down a well-carpeted hall to a door near the end. He stopped in front of it and faintly heard the tapping of a typewriter from inside. He found no button by the door, so he rapped loudly.

  The typing continued without interruption. He grimaced and knocked more loudly.

  There was still no result though he knew the occupant of the room must hear him easily. He pounded on the door with his fists, and then called loudly, “Open up, Recker.”

  That stopped the typewriter. The door was jerked open violently a moment later and Shayne was confronted by a dark, slender, angry young man of about thirty. His black hair was rumpled and he wore a back velvet smoking jacket with crimson lapels over gaudily striped pajamas and was barefooted.

  “What in Christ’s world ails you?” he demanded. “Can’t a man have privacy in his own place? Go away!”

  He tried to slam the door shut but Shayne had his big foot in the way. He said calmly, “I want to ask you a couple of questions about Elsie Murray.”

  “Elsie Murray?” Lew Recker’s thin face twitched with scornful anger. “You come up here and pound on my door and utterly destroy a creative mood to ask me about Elsie. What about her? She’s a fair lay. That’s all I know. Now will you please get your big foot the hell out of my doorway before I phone downstairs to have you thrown out?”

  “No,” said Shayne placidly. “I’m coming in, Recker. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to know about Elsie, though it may help a little. Speaking from personal experience, were you?”

  He moved forward implacably as he spoke, and Lew Recker was forced to step back or be trampled on.

  He stepped backward, snarling, “You can ask plenty others besides me. Who are you and what do you want?”

  “I’m a detective,” Shayne said blandly, “and I want all the information I can get about Elsie. She was murdered last night, you know?”

  “I didn’t know,” raged Recker. “Wait a minute. What the hell did you say?” Incredulity replaced the anger in his voice. “Murdered?”

  “Uh-huh.” Shayne took off his hat and looked around the room. It was small and orderly, with double windows overlooking the avenue. A metal typewriter desk stood directly in front of the windows, with an expensive “posture” office chair pulled away from it. There was a love-seat slipcovered in deep maroon along one wall, two comfortable chairs in a matching shade of lighter red.

  “That’s a hell of a note,” Lew Recker said. There was no real shock or horror in his voice, more a note of personal affront. “How did it happen? When?”

  “In her own apartment. Where were you from two to four o’clock this morning?” He sank into one of the comfortable chairs and crossed his long legs.

  “Me? I’m not a suspect, I hope.”

  “Every man who knew her is a suspect at the moment,” Shayne told him.

  Lew Recker laughed a little raggedly. “That gives you plenty of ground to cover. You’d better get a whole squad of dicks out asking questions.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it. You’re supposed to be the only one.”

  “Nuts! Where’d you hear a thing like that?” Recker closed the door and crossed to the sofa, seated himself carefully and arranged the crimson lapels of his velvet jacket so a goodly expanse of pajama top showed.

  “Your friend Avery Birk told me.” Shayne had a cigarette out and was lighting it. He watched Recker’s face keenly past the match flame.

  The upper lip with its tiny black mustache that reminded Shayne unpleasantly of Peter Painter’s lifted in a sneer.

  “That toad! Just because Elsie was too fastidious to go to that crummy joint of his. He rationalized his failure to make her by pretending to himself that she was unavailable to any man.”

  “Except you,” Shayne said pleasantly.

  Lew Recker shrugged, and a smirk replaced his sneer. “Well, yes. Even Birk could hardly rationalize that far.”

  “All right,” said Shayne. “Where were you between two and four this morning?”

  “Right here in my own bed.”

  “Any proof of that?”

  Recker hesitated the proper interval. He dropped his eyes and murmured, “That’s a leading question.”

  “Answer it.”

  “I don’t think I will,” Recker said complacently. “I’m not arrested or charged with any crime, am I?”

  “Not yet,” growled Shayne. “But it can happen if you hold out evidence in a homicide.”

  “I’m not holding out evidence in a homicide. What earthly proof do you have that my whereabouts have a single thing to do with Elsie’s death?”

  “Were you at a banquet last night?”

  Recker nodded. “The annual Poe Dinner of the Mystery Writers of America. Sure. I was there. Along with Elsie and several hundred others.”

  “You a mystery writer?”

  “Not exactly, I trust. I joined the organization for fun and games and to give them the support of my name. I write Novels of Suspense.” His voice supplied the capital letters.

  “See here,” he went on suddenly, sitting erect and pointing a forefinger at Shayne while his thin dark face twitched with excitement. “Check up on an out-of-town writer named Brett Halliday. He writes those lousy books about a dumb redheaded private eye in Miami. He was really making
a play for Elsie last night. Drunk as a coot and being obnoxious all over the place. Throwing his weight around until Elsie must have thought he was someone important. I can’t swear he persuaded her to leave with him, but he was working at it hard. Lots of us at the bar noticed it and were disgusted, and some of them must have seen them leave.”

  Shayne nodded, his face blank. “I’ll check on that. Can you give me any other leads?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Lew Recker shook his head thoughtfully.

  “Tell me about Elsie herself.” Shayne leaned back comfortably and expelled blue smoke. “We often find the vital clue in a murder in the character of the victim. What sort of girl was she?”

  “A familiar enough type in New York.” Recker shrugged. “You might almost say a prototype. Girl from the country comes to big city as a secretary and gets in on the fringe of writing and publishing. Meets a few writers and artists and is dazzled by a new sense of freedom. Becomes daringly sophisticated very swiftly. Good-looking enough and with the right sort of figure to be invited out to parties where the liquor flows freely. You know. Not really a party girl, but… susceptible. There are thousands like her. Ready for a good time when it’s offered.”

  “I understand she was trying to be a writer herself?”

  Recker snorted disparagingly. “Who isn’t? It looks so simple. You just sit at a typewriter and put down words and editors pay you for them. Sure. She gave up her job a couple months ago and settled down to write the Great American Novel.”

  “What kind of job did she have?”

  “Secretary or file clerk in some importing house, I think,” Recker said indifferently. “She had a pretty nice place about ten blocks down the street from here at the time, but she gave it up to sublet a smaller place on Thirty-Eighth when the writing bug bit her.

  “And I can’t help blaming myself for that,” Recker went on soberly. “I’m afraid I encouraged her more than her slight talent justified. I read some of her short junk, and you know how it is. You haven’t the heart to tell a girl like that that her stuff stinks. You should, of course. Kindest thing to do in the long run. But you just don’t. You try to be kind, and that’s a mistake. First thing you know, she’s taken your generalities seriously and decides to give up everything for her Art. And she spells it with a capital A.” He paused to smile condescendingly. “Well, the kids have to get it out of their systems, I guess. They’ll never know for sure until they try that they’re really cut out to be call girls instead of novelists.”