She Woke to Darkness ms-25

by Brett Halliday

  I got up and walked around the room and thought about it, and went back into the sitting room for another small drink. A very small one this time.

  I thought of Ed Radin while I was drinking it. That was my answer. Edward P. Radin has been called the dean of true crime writers. For many years he has been covering the New York crime beat, reporting and writing up the more sensational murders for national magazines and for books that are considered classics in their field. He was on a first-name basis with most of the important homicide officials in the city, and it would be a simple matter for him to check for me.

  I’ve known Ed for years, and knew I could trust him implicitly to keep my name out of things as long as it was decently possible.

  And I had his number in my address book.

  I got my book out and thumbed through it as I went back into the bedroom. It was an old number that Ed had given me years before, but he’s the steady sort of family man who stays put, and I was hopeful he hadn’t moved.

  I gave it to the operator and waited. This time the phone at the other end rang eight times before a gruffly sleepy voice answered. I didn’t recognize it, and asked, “Is that Ed Radin?”

  “Yes. Who’s calling?”

  “Brett Halliday, Ed.”

  There was a slight pause, then Ed said wearily, “Oh, yeh. What’s up, Brett?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m a little worried about something and you can do me a hell of a big favor if you will.”

  “Sure.” He was wide awake now, and affable as always. “Shoot.”

  “It’s this. Do you know anyone at headquarters you can call to ask if there’s anything wrong at a certain apartment on East Thirty-Eighth Street? Without explaining that I asked you to do it?”

  “U-m-m. Yes. I can do that, if it’s important. Give it all to me, Brett.”

  “Got a pencil?”

  “Yes.”

  I gave him the address. “The apartment’s on the third floor. Three-C, I think. It’s in the name of Ryerson Johnson, but is being sublet at present by a girl named Elsie Murray.”

  “Hold it, Brett. I know Johnny Johnson. Has something happened…?”

  “The Johnsons are away. In Maine, I think. It’s Elsie Murray I’m worried about.”

  “Isn’t she the gal who was at the banquet tonight?”

  “That’s the one. Look, Ed, I’ll give it to you straight, so you’ll know what you’re getting into. I met Elsie at the bar of the Henry Hudson tonight. We had a few drinks and went up to her place for a couple. She had part of a book manuscript she wanted me to read, and I brought it back to my hotel about an hour ago. I read one chapter and decided to phone her. A man answered her phone and I hung up. I can’t swear to it, but if I know anything about the breed, it was a cop’s voice. Can you check it?”

  “Give me about ten minutes. Where can I reach you?”

  I gave him my telephone number and room extension. Then I hung up. Ed Radin hadn’t laughed at my request. He’s like me. He’s been around enough not to laugh off possibilities.

  I felt a lot better. If everything was all right, that was fine. If there was trouble, I’d be alerted in advance and have time to figure out just where I stood.

  I wandered back into my sitting room, sat down and picked up Elsie’s manuscript again. I began riffling through the typewritten pages, reading a line or a paragraph or a page here and there to see what it was all about.

  It was about what I’d expected, though really quite well written for an amateur. The dead man Aline found at the end of the first chapter was a complete stranger to her with no identification on his body. In a panic of fear that she has murdered him, she gets out of the hotel room without anyone seeing her.

  Then she starts back-tracking, trying to find out what happened at the party after she passed out, who the dead man is and (of course) who killed him.

  There were three male characters mixed up in the events of the evening, and from one after another, Aline had found out various things that occurred after she passed out. From my hasty look at the story, it appeared that Aline had been quite a girl with the men, and that, too, seemed to me to add up pretty well to an analysis of Elsie Murray. Finally, a disgruntled wife gets after her for stealing a husband, and the hell of it was that Aline didn’t know whether it was true or not.

  That’s the point at which Elsie had stopped writing, admitting to me that she didn’t know how to finish it.

  My telephone rang. I hurried in and it was Ed Radin. His voice was husky with excitement as he said hurriedly, “You hit it on the head, Brett, and it isn’t good. Elsie Murray is dead. Strangled. Within the past hour or so.”

  So somebody else had finished it. Elsie’s story was ended.

  I said, “She was alive when I left her, Ed.”

  “I believe you. But its still a tough spot. Can you prove she was?”

  “No. But they can’t prove she wasn’t.”

  “Can you prove what time you left her? What time you reached your hotel?”

  “Not a chance,” I said helplessly. “I didn’t meet a soul I know. I didn’t even glance at the desk clerk when I came in. The elevator boy may remember bringing me up, but there’s no reason for him to remember the time. I’ve been sitting here alone sipping a drink and reading her manuscript.”

  “All right. Here’s what I advise,” said Ed rapidly. “Sit tight and say nothing. They’ll probably be around to you soon enough. If they don’t, by any chance, wait until you see a morning paper with the story in it, and then call in fast. Tell them the truth except for having telephoned me. Everything else, but for God’s sake keep that back. I’m going over to the apartment now to get the whole story. Chances are, I’ll be able to drop in on you and give you all the dope before they reach you. Don’t leave your room. Just go along normally until something breaks that pulls you into it.”

  He hung up abruptly. I followed suit more slowly. So, this was it. After writing murder stories for fifteen years, I was suddenly in the middle of one up to my neck. I thought fleetingly about all the innocent guys I’d written about, caught in just such a set of circumstances and fighting desperately to prove their innocence. Now I knew how it felt to be trapped. The angry sense of futility. The outraged desire to proclaim my innocence and be believed.

  I realized that every move I made from now on, every word I spoke, would be viewed with suspicion. I must do nothing to indicate that I was aware of what had happened to Elsie because Ed was covering for me and I’d get him in a hell of a jam if the truth ever came out.

  I went back to the sitting room thinking deeply. There were the two telephone calls I had made through the hotel switchboard. There would be a record of those two calls. But they were both local, and I didn’t think the numbers would be available to the police. They would want to know about them anyway. All right, I’d tell the simple truth about the first call. That I had read a chapter of Elsie’s script and decided to phone her. When a man answered, I did the natural thing at that hour when you find another man is with a girl. I hung up.

  I’d have to think of some explanation for my call to Ed Radin. That is, if the hotel did keep track of local numbers. Ed would know about that. We’d work something out together.

  But the switchboard did keep track of long distance calls. That, I knew. And I wanted to make one fast.

  I couldn’t afford to do anything to draw attention to me. Even going down in the elevator to a pay phone booth just off the lobby might well be noticed at that hour in a small, quiet hotel like the Berkshire.

  But I had to make that call right away.

  I checked the silver in my pocket and found I had only a couple of dimes. But that was all right. I could reverse the charges on this call.

  Before leaving the room, I took off the black eye-patch I normally wear over my left eye. It is damnably noticeable, and removing it is a very practical method of disguise. I should explain that I wear it because of a boyhood injury to one eye which left me with a perfect
ly good eyeball but practically no sight in that eye. There is just enough vision so the eye strains to see if left uncovered, and I get bad headaches. I can and do leave the patch off for a few hours at a time with no bad effects. If I were seen going down to the pay phone without the patch on, the chances were I wouldn’t be recognized.

  I went out into the corridor and down the rear stairs. I was on the third floor, and saw no one as I went down. Luckily, the stairs at the Berkshire end in a hallway at the rear of the lobby that leads into the dining room and The Five Hundred Room, and the phone booths are located at the end of that corridor. I went directly to them without having to pass through the lobby, and pulled a door shut behind me.

  I used a dime, dialed operator, and put in a collect call to Miami, Florida.

  I was tense and keyed-up as I waited. The call went through very fast, and I exhaled a vast sigh of relief when I heard a familiar voice answer at the other end. I heard the operator say she had a collect call from Brett Halliday in New York and would he accept the charges.

  Michael Shayne said he would, and she said. “Go ahead, please.”

  Mike said, “What the hell, Brett?” and I said, “How fast can you catch a plane to New York?”

  “Pretty fast, I guess. Why?”

  “I’ve got a case for you.”

  “I’ve got a case, Brett.” Mike’s voice was patient and reasoning. “Remember the Rathbone thing I told you about?”

  “Lucy can cover you on that. I mean it, Mike. When does the next plane leave?”

  “About four, I believe. You in some kind of jam?”

  I said, “It’s bad.” Then I gave it to him straight down the line. All of it, from meeting Elsie at the bar to Ed Radin’s phone call.

  “Don’t miss the four o’clock plane,” I ended urgently. “That’ll put you in about eight. Come straight to the Berkshire. You know. On Fifty-Second…”

  “I know,” he growled, and I remembered he had stayed at the hotel himself a year or two previous while ending a case. “You sit tight and listen to Ed Radin. Best not admit you called me to come. We’ll say I had planned to meet you there all long. And listen, Brett. From what you told me about the girl’s manuscript I suggest you go through it pretty carefully while you’re waiting for the law to catch up with you. If she has put herself in the story as you think, it should give us a good line on her character and background. See you soon,” and he hung up.

  I went out of the booth and along the corridor and up the stairs again without meeting anyone. I felt a hell of a lot better after bolting my door behind me. Michael Shayne is a name that does swing some weight in New York, even if Brett Halliday doesn’t.

  I lit a cigarette and poured a short drink and got out a pencil and sat down again with Elsie’s typescript.

  Reading the rest of it was going to be different. Now I knew the girl was dead, and the book would never be completed. Knowing it was basically a true story it suddenly seemed to me that the motive for her murder must be concealed somewhere in the typewritten pages.

  I turned to chapter two of Elsie Murray’s manuscript and began to read.

  6

  Aline didn’t faint at sight of the dead man. She swayed sideways against the door frame and closed her eyes tightly. She kept them closed, and tottered backward until her legs encountered the edge of the bed.

  She sat down and let her eyes open. The back of the man’s head was toward her and she couldn’t see his features. There was a tiny round bald spot in the thinning brown hair. She stared at the bald spot in growing panic, and knew he was a complete stranger. He wore a light tropical suit.

  Aline made her eyes stay open, but they kept sliding away from the body. She fought against utter retching misery and tried to force her thoughts into a coherent pattern.

  She looked down fearfully at her hands and wrinkled white slip, but saw no sign of blood. She didn’t know yet how the man had been killed. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know…

  God, oh God! Oh, God.

  She buried her face in her hands and sank sideways on the bed and sobbed again, convulsively. When the tears stopped, she was physically exhausted, but her mind was alert and she knew what she had to do.

  Get out of that room for one thing, and trust in God that no one had seen her and recognized her coming in. But before that she must make certain there was nothing left behind that would point to her.

  The only thing missing was her handbag. The only place she hadn’t searched was the bathroom. She couldn’t. But she knew she had to.

  The drive of utter desperation brings a queer sort of strength sometimes. She sat up and took her hands from her face. She reached down with shaking fingers, pulled up the stocking that was loose around her ankle and rolled it above the knee. She picked up her discarded panties and stepped into them with a feeling of repugnance, smoothed her slip and then pulled the print dress over her head.

  She kept her eyes carefully averted from the open bathroom door as she went to the mirror and looked unhappily at her disordered hair, her ravaged and tear-stained face, and wished desperately for a comb and compact. Her purse! If she could find it in the bathroom…

  She couldn’t waste time now. She stepped into her pumps and walked steadily to the bathroom door. She didn’t look at the body until she found the light switch and clicked it.

  She studied the man’s left profile. His face was pallid and waxlike, curiously pinched and shrunken. He was clean-shaven, between thirty and forty years of age, and in death his features gave the unpleasant impression of feral cunning. She would never know, she told herself dully, whether that look had come with death or had been there when she came to the hotel room with him.

  The cause of death was now clearly evident. There was a great, gaping wound in his throat that had been inflicted by a very sharp knife or a razor.

  She jerked her gaze away and searched the room from the doorway. The tub was empty, and the only two possible places where her bag might be concealed were the closed medicine cabinet and the floor space covered by his body. By holding tightly to the doorframe and leaning inward, Aline was able to open the cabinet. It was empty.

  Almost, then, she gave up the search. But the instinct of self-preservation was alive in her, and strength surged up from some depth of her being which made it possible for her to reach down with both hands, get a firm grip on the back of the dead man’s coat between the shoulderblades and drag his body over the sill and into the bedroom.

  There was no purse in sight. Only a curious half-outline of his body, where blood had crept along the floor and congealed on the tiles.

  But he had pockets, and Aline knew she must go through them. The bag was small enough to fit in a man’s outer jacket pocket. Besides, she had to do everything she could to discover his identity before leaving him. If she could learn who he was… if she could start backtracking through the night at once… before the police started… it was barely possible she might be able to destroy all traces that would point to her as his companion at the death scene.

  There was a book of matches in his left side pocket, and a few loose coins in the right. The inner jacket pocket yielded nothing. She knelt beside him with averted face and forced her hand into each of his four trouser pockets, half turning his body to do it.

  There was nothing. No keys and no wallet. Not a scrap of paper to identify him.

  He had come out of the unknown, a stranger to her… and now he would be a stranger forever.

  And she? She had become a stranger to herself. Somehow she must go on living… forever haunted by the fear that she might have killed him.

  Not that! She couldn’t kill. The last few minutes had proved that she was capable of much she would not have believed possible. But not murder… Besides, if she had murdered him during a blackout, how had she disposed of the murder weapon? And the missing handbag?

  Of course, it was possible she had left the bag somewhere or lost it along the way before reaching the hotel room
. But the murder weapon had been in the room. And now it wasn’t. Wouldn’t the police accept that fact as evidence that another person had been in the room while she was blacked out?

  They wouldn’t. For they would never know, as she did, that the knife was not in the room when she woke. The police would have only her word that she hadn’t wakened to find it clutched in her hand, and then disposed of it.

  She must be very careful from this point on. She must take nothing for granted. Nothing! Once it was known that she had been the dead man’s companion, every single word she spoke would be suspect.

  How could she prove, for instance, that she had actually blacked out and didn’t know what had happened? There was no proof. Only her word. And to give the lie to that would be the testimony of the hotel clerk, the bell-boy and elevator operator who had doubtless seen her come in. Because when she had blacked out like this in the past, there was practically no outward evidence. Even her closest friends were never quite sure. They had laughed about it in the past, and she had laughed with them. Her coordination was scarcely impaired at all. She had been told that there was a slight thickness in her speech, but no more than in most persons after several cocktails.

  Anyone who did not know her intimately and who had seen her last night would swear on the witness stand that she might have been a little tight, but certainly in full possession of her faculties.

  The dead man must have believed that. He would have had no way of knowing the truth Even the murderer must have been unaware that she was unconscious when the murder was committed.

  Why, then, had he gone away leaving her alive to bear witness against him? Of course if he had arrived at the scene after she fell into a coma on the bed, he would know he had nothing to fear from her.

  She dragged her thoughts back from useless speculations. The important thing now was to destroy all evidence she had been in the room, and then leave the hotel without being seen.

  She stripped the case from one of the pillows and methodically wiped fingerprints from every surface she might have touched. Then she went to the mirror to smooth her hair as best she could with shaking fingers.