The Corpse Next Door

by John Farris

  The night was so hot the bugs were walking. There was a big wet spot on her dress in the hollow of her back. As she began to come around I sent Concannon upstairs to find out how she had got in.

  Her eyes opened weakly and she looked up at me. For a second she didn’t know me and then her lips closed over my whispered name and she struggled closer to me, one of her hands knocking my hat off as the arm looped around my shoulders.

  “Bill,” she whimpered. “Bill! Awful. In there. Awful.”

  “I know. I took a look.”

  “Bill, I’ve wanted to see you so bad. Why didn’t you come to Jimmy’s . . .”

  “I wanted to come, Stella. Gulliver sent me out of town.”

  “How did you happen to . . .”

  “You don’t get to ask any more questions,” I said. “My turn. What are you doing here?”

  She looked puzzled for an instant, as if she didn’t know what I meant. Then her breath caught jerkily and she reached toward her waist.

  I rolled her off me and with a quick movement pinned both arms behind her, holding her wrists together with one hand.

  “What are you doing, Bill!”

  I slid my hand along her stomach and felt something hard under her dress. I pried two buttons loose. She twisted wildly as I reached beneath her dress.

  “Bill, stop! What do you think—”

  She whipped one arm free and tried to squirm away from me so I let go of her other arm and clamped my arm across her breasts, holding her fast. She got one hand high enough to be effective and I felt the sting of her fingernails. My hand closed around the object beneath her dress and I withdrew it, shook it free of the handkerchief in which it was wrapped. It hit in the stretched apron of dress between her spread legs and rolled to the floor. It was a round shiny compact with a small, jeweled design.

  “Let go of me, you ——” she snapped, and the word hurt worse than her fingernails. I released her and she bent toward the compact, scooping it up with both hands. “The mirror’s probably broken. Oh, thanks a lot!” She was almost in tears, but not only because of the compact.

  “Whose compact is it?”

  “Mine!”

  “Where did you get it?”

  She turned around so that she kneeled facing me. “I got it here.” Her face was splotched with color, glistened damply. Her eyes had a slanted hardness, and the closed mute look that betrayed her and all the others who knew their guilt. “That’s why I came to get it. It’s mine.” She kept her voice low so she could control it.

  “How did it get here?”

  “I left it.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of months ago.”

  “When you were visiting Jimmy?”

  She hesitated. I could hear the quick breathing in her throat. “No, I wasn’t visiting Jimmy.” There were tear streams on her face, but her eyes were defiant, and I thought I caught a glimpse of something basically vicious.

  “I was visiting him.”

  “You mean Smithell?”

  “Yes. Him. Smithell. Who do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  She laughed shakily. “Oh, you’re smart tonight. You’re so smart tonight. You know what for.”

  “I don’t!”

  She told me, in the crudest terms possible.

  Funny little word, like a big swinging hammer, hitting with such force the impact is not truly realized at once. I reached out, my fingers locking tight about her arm. “You . . . you couldn’t have. You . . .”

  “Why not?” she said wildly. “Why not? You think he was too old? I can tell you he wasn’t. I can tell you.” She put her hands over her face to contain the bitter sobs.

  I put the compact on the floor and backed away from her, retreating from the swing of the hammer and the crazy hurting. It was almost a minute before I realized my face was distorted in a grimace of disgust.

  Concannon was standing close by. “. . . A window around by the side porch,” he was saying. I barely heard him. “Probably left open a few inches. The screen wasn’t hooked. She just lifted the window and crawled in that way. No breakage.”

  “Fine,” I said, nodding, not knowing what I was saying. “You’ve done a good job. Go wait in the car. I’ll call you.”

  I looked down at her after he had gone, searching for the whore taint, trying to see her as she must be, as Gulliver and others saw her—Stella of the cheap carnal thrust of breast and teasing spread of pelvis. Far off, in a great gray place of mind, I heard my own inner voices trying to talk away the pain.

  What did you expect? What? You knew it had to be like this. What did you expect, a padlock and sign, property of Bill Randall? What’s the matter with you? You act like she was something, something. You dumb cop . . .

  And above the undercurrent of reasoning the ugly fantasies rioted. I remembered the look of him, and while alive Smithell undeniably had had a certain hard gray handsomeness, his small body without flabbiness. It must not have been unpleasant for her.

  Her crying had been brief and she was looking at me now, waiting carefully. She seemed uncertain of me, but her eyes showed no remorse. I knew then how it was with her, and me. Well, it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t important. I tried to think how to talk to her, how to be just as casual about it as she was.

  “I . . . I . . . guess I . . . have been thinking kind of wrong about you.”

  Her lips parted and for an instant I thought I saw a hint of something in her eyes, deep hurt and loneliness. Then she picked up the compact and the green eyes were indifferent as she inspected her face in the mirror. She removed the pad from inside to touch up her face here and there.

  “Don’t let it get you down, Bill,” she said unemotionally.

  “Was the mirror broken?” I said. It seemed important.

  “Cracked a little.”

  “What . . . did you do it for, Stella?”

  She looked at me with a funny slanted smile, and I thought she was going to twist the knife deeper. Instead her features softened a little, and she said, “Bill . . . it was Jimmy. I made the mistake of .. . visiting him here one day. The old man wanted me. I knew, the way he looked at me. He came to my place and told me. He would open a savings account for Jimmy. Every time I came to his bed he would put twenty-five dollars in the account for Jimmy.” She paused, frowning a little. “I got took. He used me three times, told me not to come back. The part about the savings account . . .” She looked at me, cynical amusement in her eyes. “It wasn’t true.”

  I saw now that maybe she was sorry, that she would try to make me believe it was all because of Jimmy and she hadn’t enjoyed it a bit. I saw that.

  “Just a whore job,” I said roughly. “Just another whore job.”

  “Bill,” she said, her voice tired. “Bill, please.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Don’t let me offend you. Let’s not talk about nasty things.”

  “What,” she said, “do you want from me, Bill? Having a man doesn’t mean much more to me than washing my hair.” She grimaced in bewilderment. “All the time you keep trying to make me like I was something holy in a church.”

  “Shut up, you—”

  I turned my back on her and went outside, into the night that simmered and was as sticky to move around in as wallpaper paste. I smelled the acrid vomit-stink deep in my nostrils and knew with a sort of harsh empty despair that I would always smell it when I thought of this time, and of her.

  I threw a half-smoked cigarette into the grass and went back. She sat primly on the floor with her legs folded under her. Only the fingers laced tightly together in her lap betrayed her tension.

  “You don’t look good,” I said. “Illegal entry, in the first place. Then there’s that corpse in the trunk.”

  Her mouth pinched together and her face was old with the memory of shock.

  “I’m going to be arrested,” she said, with a thin sigh. “I know it. I expect it. Don’t think you’re telling me anything.
But I just came to get what’s mine. I didn’t take anything else.”

  “Where was the compact?”

  “In his bathroom. I had trouble finding it.”

  “How did you happen to get down to the basement?”

  “I thought he might have something else of mine stored away. He was the souvenir-collecting type.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh . . . earrings or something. I’m not so rich I can afford to lose any.”

  “I’m sure you just walked out of here one night without them.”

  “You’d be surprised what a girl will do after . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  “All right.”

  “You didn’t find anything else?”

  “Him.” Her mouth twitched.

  “Ever see him before?”

  “Good Lord, no.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “As good as I’m going to get. You couldn’t force me to go back in there again and look. I’ll die first.”

  “He was murdered, you know.”

  She looked at me calmly. “No. I didn’t.”

  “How did you get in that storage room?”

  “Walked in. Opened the door and walked in.”

  I glanced at the door. A padlock hung from a steep loop attached to the frame.

  “You were being kind of brave, wandering around an empty house in the dark, weren’t you?” I said.

  “If I had known there were any dead men around I wouldn’t have come within miles of the place,” she replied. “I really wanted my compact back. It means . . . a great deal to me.”

  “For services rendered, no doubt.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to go to jail now and get it over with,” she said.

  “Have you ever been booked before?”

  “No.” Hopefully, “Am I going to jail?”

  “I don’t know. Go over there and sit on that sofa until I’m ready to think about it.”

  She sat down and combed back her mane of hair with her fingers and folded her arms across her breasts. She stared silently at a clock on the opposite wall, waiting for the cuckoo to come out and wink at her.

  I heard the sound of hard leather heels on the stone paving outside and Concannon said, “We’ve got a visitor, Sergeant.”

  I TURNED AND LOOKED AT KARIS FISHER. SHE WAS WEARING a robe, and moccasin slippers over her bare feet. She looked back at me timidly, her hands loosely clasped before her, like a chastened little girl. Concannon guided her respectfully inside with a hand at her elbow.

  “Hello,” I said, without enthusiasm.

  “She was standing in the back yard next door,” Concannon said, tilting his head in the direction of the house that stood between the Fisher home and Smithell’s place, “looking down this way.”

  “I heard somebody screaming,” Karis said irritably. “I didn’t know you all were here. I thought . . . somebody should find out what happened. The Bishops are on vacation so I knew it didn’t come from there. When I came across the Bishops’ yard I saw a light in the basement here. Because of their hedge I couldn’t see a police car or anything in the street. I was standing by the barbecue pit trying to decide what to do when this man came up behind me. He scared the life out of me.”

  Concannon looked at her wryly. “I’m sorry, lady. You scared me too.” He reached to his belt and withdrew a .22 target pistol. “I didn’t know she was carrying this. When she turned around the barrel wasn’t more ’n six inches from me. My belly is still jumping.

  “May I have it back now?” Karis said stiffly. Concannon glanced at me and I nodded. Karis took the automatic from his outstretched arm, jacked the shell out of the chamber, removed the magazine and let the slide forward, dropped the automatic into a pocket of her robe. She did this without looking at the gun. She looked around the basement alertly, noticing Stella. Her eyes rested on Stella for a few seconds, then turned toward me. Concannon touched the peak of his cap and went away.

  “Did the scream wake you up?” I asked.

  She seemed more relaxed now, but her eyes looked tired and there was a tight little stitch at one corner of her mouth. There was something about her that was very different from the Karis Fisher I had seen a few nights before. I realized then that the smile I had liked so much was necessary to counterbalance the slim dark brooding aspect of her. I wondered how I looked to her, what change was apparent since that swift fallen moment when Stella had challenged me to accept her cheapness.

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, her voice low. “I was standing at the window in my bedroom when I heard the scream. It was muffled, but enough to make me cringe. It made me want to hide under the bed. And at the same time I knew I had to find out.”

  She looked again at Stella.

  “What is it, Bill? Who is this girl?”

  “Stella Francis. Jimmy Herne’s cousin. I can’t tell you much yet. She found a dead man in that storage room.” I indicated the open door.

  “A . . . dead man?”

  “A corpse,” I said impatiently. “Dead. You know, not breathing.”

  She took a step toward the room.

  “Better not. He’s been in the trunk a long time. He looks like a dried green bean.”

  She slid back her foot uneasily and her shoulders pulled up slightly beneath the robe. “In the . . . who, Bill? Who is it?”

  “How the hell would I know? He looks like practically nobody with his face the way it is.”

  She moved closer to me, and her eyes were on my cheek. She touched the rough drying scratches Stella had put there, until I took her hand away. I realized that she wasn’t hurt by my rudeness, but in a few brief seconds had grasped a knowledge of me that I would never have been able to tell. I looked at her and her eyes were full of a fundamental strength and certainty, and shyness.

  “Why didn’t Nathan come?” I asked her.

  She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, her eyes half-closed. “He . . . isn’t home. He hasn’t come home yet.” And I understood then the standing at the window, with night shrinking around her, and the somber look of beginning fear. It was part of the strengthening awareness we both shared, that had begun at so strange and yet so proper a time.

  “Bill,” Stella said in a stricken voice.

  I looked at her, startled. Her hands were over her face, her legs pressed tightly together.

  Karis went to her, putting a hand on Stella’s shoulder. Stella leaned away from her touch, the compact sliding off her thigh, a polished glimpse of gold between folds of the handkerchief.

  Karis reached toward it, leaning over Stella, but Stella grabbed it with both hands and stood up.

  Karis spoke. “Bill—when you can, will you come and tell me about it?”

  “If you want me to.”

  She gave me a sad smile and left, the target gun hanging heavy in one pocket of her robe.

  Russ came clumping down the stairs with my camera equipment. I told him where to stack it.

  “Take Stella,” I said to Russ.

  “What do we book her on?”

  Stella looked dully at me. Her mouth was open as if she didn’t have enough will to close it.

  “We don’t. You’re taking her home, not downtown.”

  Russ looked at me questioningly. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. He had never called me “sir” in his life before.

  Stella straightened and tugged at her dress. She held the compact tightly in one hand. “Bill—” she said, her voice full of despair.

  “Get her out of here,” I said. I bent over and picked my hat off the floor, went back into the storage room.

  The trunk was pushed up against a thin partitioning wall. I opened a door in this wall and found that a furnace occupied most of the space on the other side. Water and steam pipes ran close to the ceiling in the storage room.

  Next to the trunk lay a suitcase with a corroded brass lock. I noticed some bright scratches in the greenish corrosion, which could
indicate that the suitcase had been opened recently. Directly above the lock of the suitcase hung the L-joint of a water pipe, conspicuously new.

  I found nothing inside when I opened the suitcase. But as I brushed my fingertips across the lining I discovered a small slit and a bulkiness underneath. Reaching inside the slit, I withdrew a handful of old newspaper clippings.

  I spread some of them out on the concrete floor. One headline in particular caught my eye:

  $40,000 STOLEN FROM INDUSTRIAL NATIONAL BANK

  IDENTIFYING THE MAN IN THE TRUNK WAS EASY. HIS POCKETS were clean; there was no wallet or anything like that. But the clothing labels had not been removed. We put out tracers and found that his name was Joseph Veilleux, and his last address 649 Darby Street, Troy, New York. He was forty-four years old, five feet nine inches tall, and weighed about one hundred sixty pounds when alive. There were also a couple of pictures which showed him to be a rather sullen-looking man with a thick mustache. The Troy police later sent us a photostat of an expired permit to carry a gun, partially explaining the .38 revolver we had found in his coat pocket.

  I was tagging the revolver on my desk when Hugo Kenwick came into the office. Hugo is a grim-faced man with oily gray hair and many brownish splotches on his face. He is always washing his hands together as if something unpleasant clings to the skin. Hugo is a successful mortician and, due to the turn of a political card, our county coroner. We’ve had worse coroners. Hugo is conscientious about the job, and he has a son in medical school who helps him over the rough spots.

  He tossed a couple of paper-clipped sheets of paper at me. “Here’s the gory details,” he said loudly. Hugo is a little deaf and hates to miss a word he says. He brushed at a couple of aphid-like insects on his soiled white shirt and added, “God, between the bugs and the heat, how can you guys stand it in here?”

  I looked at Phil Naar, who was over by the high open window, talking on the phone to someone at the Troy police department. He turned away slightly and put a finger in his other ear.

  “We manage somehow,” I said. I pushed Hugo’s report aside and yawned. It had been a long night and I was beginning to feel the relaxation of pressures along with a sense of satisfaction, as the thing became explainable.