“Is he in here at all?” He breathed heavily. “That may be somebody else’s car out there across the way.”
At that instant there was the blurred but unmistakable sound that loose, falling earth makes, dropping back into a hollow or cavity. You hear it on the streets when a drainage ditch is being refilled. You hear it in a cemetery when a grave is being covered up. In the silence of this house, in the dead of night, it had a knell-like sound of finality. Burial.
Bliss gave a strangled gasp of horror, lurched forward in the darkness.
“He’s already—through!”
The sound had seemed to come from somewhere underneath them. Bliss made for the basement door. Stillman’s heavy footfalls pounded after him, all thought of concealment past.
Bliss clawed open the door that gave down to the cellar, flung it back. For a split second, and no more, dull-yellow light gleamed up from below. Then it snuffed out, too quickly to show them anything. There was pitch blackness below them, as above, and an ominous silence.
Something clicked just over Bliss’s shoulder, and the pale moon of Stillman’s torch glowed out from the cellar floor below them, started traveling around, looking for something to center on. Instantly a vicious tongue of flame spurted toward the parent orb, the reflector, and something flew past Bliss, went spat against the wall, as a thunderous boom sounded below.
Bliss could sense, rather than tell, that Stillman was raising his gun behind him. He clawed out, caught the cuff of the detective’s sleeve, brought it down. “Don’t! She may be down there somewhere in the line of fire!”
Something shot out over his shoulder. Not a gun or slug, but the torch itself. Stillman was trying to turn it into a sort of readymade star shell, by throwing it down there still lighted. The light pool on the floor streaked off like a comet, flicked across the ceiling, dropped down on the other side, and steadied itself against the far wall—with a pair of trouser legs caught squarely in the light, from the knees down. They buckled to jump aside, out of the revealing beam, but not quickly enough. Stillman sighted his gun at a kneecap and fired. The legs jolted, wobbled, folded up forward toward the light, bringing a torso and head down into view on the floor. When the fall ended, the beam of the torch was weirdly centered on the exact crown of a bald head surrounded by a circular fringe of reddish hair. It rolled from side to side like a giant ostrich egg, screaming agonizedly into the cellar floor.
“I’ll take him,” Stillman grunted. “You put on that light!”
Bliss groped for the dangling light cord that had proved such a hindrance to them just now by being down in the center of the basement instead of up by the doorway where they could get at it. He snagged it, found the finger switch, turned it. Horror flooded the place at his touch, in piebald tones of deep black shadow and pale yellow. The shovel Alden had just started to wield when he heard them coming lay half across a mound of freshly disinterred earth. Near it were the flat flagstones that had topped it, flooring the cellar, and the pickax that had loosened them. He must have brought the tools with him in the car, for they weren’t Bliss’s.
And on the other side of that mound—the short but deep hole the earth had come out of. Alden must have been working away down here for some time, to get so much done single-handed. And yet, though they had arrived before he’d finished, they were still too late—for in the hole, filling it to within an inch or two of the top, and fitting the sides even more closely, rested a deep old-fashioned trunk that had probably belonged to Smiles’ mother and come down in the trunk compartment of the car. And four-square as it was, it looked ominously small for anyone to fit into—whole.
Bliss pointed down at it, moaned sickly. “She—she—”
He wanted to fold up and let himself topple inertly across the mound of earth before it. Stillman’s sharp, whiplike command kept him upright. “Hang on! Coming!”
He had clipped the back of Alden’s skull with his gun butt, to put him out of commission while their backs were turned. He leaped up on the mound of earth, and across the hole to the opposite side, then dropped down by the trunk, tugging at it.
“There’s no blood around; he may have put her in alive. Hurry up, help me to get the lid up! Don’t waste time trying to lift the whole thing out; just the lid. Get some air into it—”
It shot up between the two of them, and within lay a huddled bulk of sacking, pitifully doubled around on itself. It was still moving feebly. Fluttering spasmodically, rather than struggling any more.
The blade of the penknife Stillman had already used once before tonight flew out, slashed furiously at the coarse stuff. A contorted face was revealed through the rents, but not recognizable as Smiles’ any more—a face black with suffocation, in which the last spark of life had been about to go out. And still might, if they didn’t coax it back in a hurry.
They got her up out of it between them and straightened her out flat on the floor. Stillman sawed away at the short length of rope cruelly twisted around her neck, the cause of suffocation, severed it after seconds that seemed like centuries, unwound it, flung it off. Bliss, meanwhile, was stripping off the tattered remnants of the sacking. She was in a white silk slip.
Stillman straightened up, jumped for the stairs. “Breathe into her mouth like they do with choking kids. I’ll send out a call for a Pulmotor.”
But the battle was already won by the time he came trooping down again; they could both tell that, laymen though they were. The congested darkness was leaving her face little by little, her chest was rising and falling of its own accord, she was coughing distressedly, and making little whimpering sounds of returning consciousness. They carried her up to the floor above when the emergency apparatus arrived, nevertheless, just to make doubly sure. It was while they were both up there, absorbed in watching the Pulmotor being used on her, that a single shot boomed out in the basement under them, with ominous finality.
Stillman clapped a hand to his hip. “Forgot to take his gun away from him. Well, there goes one of Cochrane’s prisoners!”
They ran for the basement stairs, stopped halfway down them, one behind the other, looking at Alden’s still form lying there below. It was still face-down, in the same position as before. One arm, curved under his own body at chest level, and a lazy tendril of smoke curling up around his ribs, told the difference.
“What a detective I am!” Stillman said disgustedly.
“It’s better this way,” Bliss answered, tight-lipped. “I think I would have killed him with my own bare hands, before they got him out of here, after what he tried to do to her tonight!”
By the time they returned upstairs again, Cochrane had come in with the woman. They were both being iodined and bandaged by an intern.
“What happened?” Stillman asked dryly. “Looks like she gave you more trouble than he gave us.”
“Did you ever try to hang onto the outside of a wild car while the driver tried to shake you off? I’d gotten up to within one tree length of her, when the shots down in the basement tipped her off Alden was in for it. I just had time to make a flying tackle for the baggage rack before she was off a mile a minute. I had to work my way forward along the running-board, with her swerving and flinging around corners on two wheels. She finally piled up against a refuse-collection truck; dunno how it was we both weren’t killed.”
“Well, she’s all yours, Cochrane,” Stillman said. “But first I’m going to have to ask you to let me take her over to headquarters with me. You, too, Bliss.” He looked at his watch. “I promised my lieutenant I’d be in with you by nine the latest, and I’m a stickler for keeping a promise. We’ll be a little early, but unforeseen circumstances came up.”
At headquarters, in the presence of Bliss, Stillman, Cochrane, the lieutenant of detectives, and the necessary police stenographer, Alden’s accomplice was prevailed on to talk.
“My name is Irma Gilman,” she began, “and I’m thirty-nine years old. I used to be a trained nurse on the staff of one of the large metropolita
n hospitals. Two of my patients lost their lives through carelessness on my part, and I was discharged.
“I met Joe Alden six months ago. His wife was in ill health, so I moved in with them to look after her. Her first husband had left her well off, with slews of negotiable bonds. Alden had already helped himself to a few of them before I showed up, but now that I was there, he wanted to get rid of her altogether, so that we could get our hands on the rest. I told him he’d never get away with anything there, where everybody knew her; he’d have to take her somewhere else first. He went looking for a house, and when he’d found one that suited him, the place in Denby, he took me out to inspect it, without her, and palmed me off on the agent as his wife.
“We made all the arrangements, and when the day came to move, he went ahead with the moving van. I followed in the car with her after dark. That timed it so that we reached there late at night; there wasn’t a soul around any more to see her go in. And from then on, as far as anyone in Denby knew, there were only two of us living in the house, not three. We didn’t keep her locked up, but we put her in a bedroom at the back, where she couldn’t be seen from the road, and put up a fine-meshed screen on the window. She was bed-ridden a good part of the time, anyway, and that made it easier to keep her presence concealed.
“He started to make his preparations from the moment we moved in. He began building this low wall out in front, as an excuse to order the bricks and other materials that he needed for the real work later on. He ordered more from the contractor than he needed, of course.
“Finally it happened. She felt a little better one day, came downstairs, and started checking over her list of bonds. He’d persuaded her when they were first married not to entrust them to a bank; she had them in an ordinary strongbox. She found out some of them were already missing. He went in there to her, and I listened outside the door. She didn’t say very much, just: ‘I thought I had more of these thousand-dollar bonds.’ But that was enough to show us that she’d caught on. Then she got up very quietly and went out of the room without another word.
“Before we knew it, she was on the telephone in the hall—trying to get help, I suppose. She didn’t have a chance to utter a word; he was too quick for her. He jumped out after her and pulled it away from her. He was between her and the front door, and she turned and went back upstairs, still without a sound, not even a scream. Maybe she still did not realize she was in bodily danger, thought she could get her things on and get out of the house.
“He said to me, ‘Go outside and wait in front. Make sure there’s no one anywhere in sight, up and down the road or in the fields.’ I went out there, looked, raised my arm and dropped it, as a signal to him to go ahead. He went up the stairs after her.
“You couldn’t hear a thing from inside. Not even a scream, or a chair falling over. He must have done it very quietly. In a while he came down to the door again. He was breathing a little fast and his face was a little pale, that was all. He said, ‘It’s over. I smothered her with one of the bed pillows. She didn’t have much strength.’ Then he went in again and carried her body down to the basement. We kept her down there while he went to work on this other wall; as soon as it was up high enough, he put her behind it and finished it. He repainted the whole room so that one side wouldn’t look too new.
“Then, without a word of warning, the girl showed up the other night. Luckily, just that night Joe had stayed down at the hotel late having a few beers. He recognized her as she got off the bus and brought her out with him in the car. That did away with her having to ask her way of anyone. We stalled her for a few minutes by pretending her mother was fast asleep, until I had time to put a sedative in some tea I gave her to drink. After that it was easy to handle her; we put her down in the basement and kept her doped down there.
“Joe remembered, from one of her letters, that she’d said her husband had insured her, so that gave us our angle. The next day I faked a long letter to her and mailed it to the city, as if she’d never shown up here at all. Then when Bliss came up looking for her, I tried to dope him, too, to give us a chance to transport her back to his house during his absence, finish her off down there, and pin it on him. He spoiled that by passing the food up and walking out on us. The only thing left for us to do after that was for Joe to beat the bus in, plant her clothes ahead of time, and put a bee in the police’s bonnet. That was just to get Bliss out of the way, so the coast would be left clear to get her in down there.
“We called his house from just inside the city limits when we got down here with her tonight. No one answered, so it seemed to have worked. But we’d lost a lot of time on account of that blowout. I waited outside in the car, with her covered up on the floor, drugged. When Joe had the hole dug, he came out and took her in with him.
“We thought all the risk we had to run was down at this end. We were sure we were perfectly safe up at the other end; Joe had done such a bang-up job on that wall. I still can’t understand how you caught onto it so quick.”
“I’m an architect, that’s why,” Bliss said grimly. “There was something about that room that bothered me. It wasn’t on the square.”
Smiles was lying in bed when Bliss went back to his own house, and she was pretty again. When she opened her eyes and looked up at him, they were all crinkly and smiling just as they used to be.
“Honey,” she said, “it’s so good to have you near me. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never walk out on you again.”
“That’s right, you stay where you belong, with Ed,” he said soothingly, “and nothing like that’ll ever happen to you again.”
MURDER ALWAYS GATHERS MOMENTUM
Paine hung around outside the house waiting for old Ben Burroughs’ caller to go, because he wanted to see him alone. You can’t very well ask anyone for a loan of $250 in the presence of someone else, especially when you have a pretty strong hunch you’re going to be turned down flat and told where to get off, into the bargain.
But he had a stronger reason for not wanting witnesses to his interview with the old skinflint. The large handkerchief in his back pocket, folded triangularly, had a special purpose, and that little instrument in another pocket—wasn’t it to be used in prying open a window?
While he lurked in the shrubbery, watching the lighted window and Burroughs’ seated form inside it, he kept rehearsing the plea he’d composed, as though he were still going to use it.
“Mr. Burroughs, I know it’s late, and I know you’d rather not be reminded that I exist, but desperation can’t wait; and I’m desperate.” That sounded good. “Mr. Burroughs, I worked for your concern faithfully for ten long years, and the last six months of its existence, to help keep it going, I voluntarily worked at half-wages, on your given word that my defaulted pay would be made up as soon as things got better. Instead of that, you went into phony bankruptcy to cancel your obligations.”
Then a little soft soap to take the sting out of it. “I have-n’t come near you all these years, and I haven’t come to make trouble now. If I thought you really didn’t have the money, I still wouldn’t. But it’s common knowledge by now that the bankruptcy was feigned; it’s obvious by the way you continue to live that you salvaged your own investment; and I’ve lately heard rumors of your backing a dummy corporation under another name to take up where you left off. Mr. Burroughs, the exact amount of the six months’ promissory half-wages due me is two hundred and fifty dollars.”
Just the right amount of dignity and self-respect, Pauline had commented at this point; not wishy-washy or maudlin, just quiet and effective.
And then for a bang-up finish, and every word of it true. “Mr. Burroughs, I have to have help tonight; it can’t wait another twenty-four hours. There’s a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece in the sole of each of my shoes; I have a wedge of cardboard in the bottom of each one. We haven’t had light or gas in a week now. There’s a bailiff coming tomorrow morning to put out the little that’s left of our furniture and seal the door.
&nbs
p; “If I was alone in this, I’d still fight it through, without going to anyone. But, Mr. Burroughs, I have a wife at home to support. You may not remember her, a pretty little dark-haired girl who once worked as a stenographer in your office for a month or two. You surely wouldn’t know her now—she’s aged twenty years in the past two.”
That was about all. That was about all anyone could have said. And yet Paine knew he was licked before he even uttered a word of it.
He couldn’t see the old man’s visitor. The caller was out of range of the window. Burroughs was seated in a line with it, profile toward Paine. Paine could see his mean, thin-lipped mouth moving. Once or twice he raised his hand in a desultory gesture. Then he seemed to be listening and finally he nodded slowly. He held his forefinger up and shook it, as if impressing some point on his auditor. After that he rose and moved deeper into the room, but without getting out of line with the window.
He stood against the far wall, hand out to a tapestry hanging there. Paine craned his neck, strained his eyes. There must be a wall safe behind there the old codger was about to open.
If he only had a pair of binoculars handy.
Paine saw the old miser pause, turn his head and make some request of the other person. A hand abruptly grasped the looped shade cord and drew the shade to the bottom.
Paine gritted his teeth. The old fossil wasn’t taking any chances, was he? You’d think he was a mind-reader, knew there was someone out there. But a chink remained, showing a line of light at the bottom. Paine sidled out of his hiding place and slipped up to the window. He put his eyes to it, focused on Burroughs’ dialing hand, to the exclusion of everything else.
A three-quarters turn to the left, about to where the numeral 8 would be on the face of the clock. Then back to about where 3 would be. Then back the other way, this time to 10. Simple enough. He must remember that—8-3-10.
FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum Page 16
