The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

She caught herself, fear constricting her throat. Lieutenant Powers grinned grimly.

  “Missed a bet, huh, Mrs. Clinton?”

  “I — I don’t know what you’re —”

  “Come off of it! The bathtub’s dry as an oven. The shower was never turned on, and you know why it wasn’t. Because there was a guy standing inside of it.”

  “B-but —but I don’t know anything. I was unconscious, and—”

  “Then, how do you know what happened? How do you know this guy went into the bedroom and started tearing it apart? And how did you make that telephone call?”

  “Well, I... I wasn’t completely unconscious. I sort of knew what was going on without really—

  “Now, you listen to me,” he said harshly. “You made that fake call of yours —yes, I said fake — to the operator at twenty-three minutes after five. There happened to be a prowl car right here in the neighborhood, so two minutes later, at five twenty-five, there were cops here in your apartment. You were unconscious then, more than an hour ago. You’ve been unconscious until just now.”

  Ardis’s brain whirled. Then it cleared suddenly, and a great calm came over her.

  “I don’t see quite what you’re hinting at, Lieutenant. If you’re saying that I was confused, mixed up — that I must have dreamed or imagined some of the things I told you — I’ll admit it.”

  “You know what I’m saying! I’m saying that no guy could have got in and out of this place, and done what this one did, in any two minutes!”

  “Then the telephone operator must have been mistaken about the time,” Ardis said brightly. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  Powers grunted. He said he could give her a better explanation — and he gave it to her. The right one. Ardis listened to it placidly, murmuring polite objections.

  “That’s ridiculous, Lieutenant. Regardless of any gossip you may have heard, I don’t know this, uh, Tony person. And I most certainly did not plot with him or anyone else to kill my husband. Why—”

  “He says you did. We got a signed confession from him.”

  “Have you?” But of course they didn’t have. They might have found out about Tony, but he would never have talked. “That hardly proves anything, does it?”

  “Now, you listen to me, Mrs. Clinton! Maybe you think that —”

  “How is my husband, anyway? I do hope he wasn’t seriously hurt.”

  “How is he?” the lieutenant snarled. “How would he be after gettin’ worked over with—” He broke off, his eyes flickering. “As a matter of fact,” he said heavily, “he’s going to be all right. He was pretty badly injured, but he was able to give us a statement and —”

  “I’m so glad. But why are you questioning me, then?” It was another trick. Bill had to be dead. “If he gave you a statement, then you must know that everything happened just like I said.”

  She waited, looked at him quizzically. Powers scowled, his stern face wrinkling with exasperation.

  “All right,” he said at last. “All right, Mrs. Clinton. Your husband is dead. We don’t have any statement from him, and we don’t have any confession from Tony.”

  “Yes?”

  “But we know that you’re guilty, and you know that you are. And you’d better get it off your conscience while you still can.”

  “While I still can?”

  “Doc” — Powers jerked his head at the doctor. At the man, that is, who appeared to be a doctor. “Lay it on the line, Doc. Tell her that her boyfriend hit her a little too hard.”

  The man came forward hesitantly. He said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clinton. You have a — uh — you’ve sustained a very serious injury.”

  “Have I?” Ardis smiled. “I feel fine.”

  “I don’t think,” the doctor said judiciously, “that that’s quite true. What you mean is that you don’t feel anything at all. You couldn’t. You see, with an injury such as yours —”

  “Get out,” Ardis said. “Both of you get out.”

  “Please, Mrs. Clinton. Believe me, this isn’t a trick. I haven’t wanted to alarm you, but—”

  “And you haven’t,” she said. “You haven’t scared me even a little bit, mister. Now, clear out!”

  She closed her eyes, kept them closed firmly. When, at last, she reopened them, Powers and the doctor — if he really had been a doctor — were gone. And the room was in darkness.

  She lay smiling to herself, congratulating herself. In the corridor outside, she heard heavy footsteps approaching; and she tensed for a moment. Then, remembering, she relaxed again.

  Not Bill, of course. She was through with that jerk forever. He’d driven her half out of her mind, got her to the point where she couldn’t have taken another minute of him if her life depended on it. But now ...

  The footsteps stopped in front of her door. A key turned in the lock, the door opened and closed.

  There was a clatter of a lunch pail being set down; then a familiar voice — maddeningly familiar words:

  “Well. Another day, another dollar.”

  Ardis’s mouth tightened; it twisted slowly in a malicious grin. So they hadn’t given up yet! They were pulling this one last trick. Well, let them; she’d play along with the gag.

  The man plodded across the room, stooped, and gave her a halfhearted peck on the cheek. “Long time no see,” he said. “What we havin’ for supper?”

  “Bill...” Ardis said. “How do I look, Bill?”

  “OK. Got your lipstick smeared, though. What’d you say we was having for supper?”

  “Stewed owls! Now, look, mister. I don’t know who you —”

  “Sounds good. We got any hot water?”

  “Of course, we’ve got hot water! Don’t we always have? Why do you always have to ask if — if—”

  She couldn’t go through with it. Even as a gag — even someone who merely sounded and acted like he did — it was too much to bear.

  “Y-you get out of here!” she quavered. “I don’t have to stand for this! I c-can’t stand it! I did it for fifteen years, and —”

  “So what’s to get excited about?” he said. “Well, guess I’ll go splash the chassis.”

  “Stop it! STOP IT!” Her screams filled the room ... silent screams ripping through silence. “He’s —you’re dead! I know you are! You’re dead, and I don’t have to put up with you for another minute. And — and —!”

  “Wouldn’t take no bets on that if I was you,” he said mildly. “Not with a broken neck like yours.”

  He trudged off toward the bathroom, wherever the bathroom is in Eternity.

  <>

  * * * *

  1968

  CORNELL WOOLRICH

  * * *

  FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE

  Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich (1903-1968) was born in New York City but divided his early years between Latin America and Mexico, with his father, and New York, with his Manhattan socialite mother. While still an undergraduate at Columbia University, he wrote his first novel, a romance, Cover Charge (1926). Another romantic novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), quickly followed, and it won a $10,000 prize jointly offered by College Humor magazine and First National Pictures, which filmed it in 1929. Four more romantic novels, favorably compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed. Woolrich had also begun to write short stories, and his first mystery was published in 1934. Most of his subsequent work (more than two hundred stories and sixteen novels) was in that genre. A reclusive alcoholic, he rarely left his hotel room for the last three decades of his life.

  Arguably the greatest suspense writer of the twentieth century, Woolrich, under his own name and the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, was able to construct plots that stretched credulity, especially in their dependence on coincidence, yet relentlessly gripped readers. He is noted for producing stories of the everyday gone wrong, as terrible things happen to ordinary people. More than twenty of his novels and stories were filmed, including The Leopard Man (1943), based on Black Alibi (19
42), directed by Jacques Tourneur; Phantom Lady (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak; Rear Window (1954), based on “It Had to Be Murder” and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; and The Bride Wore Black (1967), directed by Francois Truffaut. More true of the literary works than the motion pictures (since Hollywood preferred happy endings), Woolrich was able to heighten suspense by being totally unpredictable, with readers never knowing if the suspense would be relieved or if it would be worse when the tale was ended.

  “For the Rest of Her Life,” the last Woolrich story published during his lifetime, first appeared in the May 1968 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and was first collected in his Angels of Darkness (1978). It was made into a two-hour television movie in West Germany in 1974, directed and adapted for the screen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

  ~ * ~

  T

  heir eyes met in Rome. On a street in Rome — the Via Piemonte.

  He was coming down it, coming along toward her, when she first saw him. She didn’t know it but he was also coming into her life, into her destiny — bringing what was meant to be.

  Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.

  If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.

  As their eyes met, they held. For just a heartbeat.

  He wasn’t cheap. He wasn’t sidewalk riffraff. His clothes were good clothes, and his air was a good air.

  He was a personable-looking man. First your eye said: he’s not young anymore, he’s not a boy anymore. Then your eye said: but he’s not old. There was something of youth hovering over and about him, and yet refusing to land in any one particular place. As though it were about to take off and leave him. Yet not quite that, either. More as though it had never fully been there in the first place. In short, the impression it was, was agelessness. Not young, not old, not callow, not mature — but ageless. Thirty-six looking fifty-six, or fifty-six looking thirty-six, but which it was you could not say.

  Their eyes met — and held. For just a heartbeat.

  Then they passed one another by, on the Via Piemonte, but without any turn of their heads to prolong the look.

  I wonder who that was, she thought.

  What he thought couldn’t be known — at least, not by her.

  Three nights later they met again, at a party the friend she was staying with took her to.

  He came over to her, and she said, “I’ve seen you before. I passed you on Monday on the Via Piemonte. At about four in the afternoon.”

  “I remember you, too,” he said. “I noticed you that day, going by.”

  I wonder why we remember each other like that, she mused; I’ve passed dozens, hundreds of other people since, and he must have too. I don’t remember any of them.

  “I’m Mark Ramsey,” he said.

  “I’m Linda Harris.”

  An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion, and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths.

  As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be.

  It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk cafe, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk cafe. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place — while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting.

  One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower.

  And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does: a desire to please, to look one’s best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift — a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on.

  So it goes.

  And suddenly they part, and suddenly there’s a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment.

  Rome passed into the past, and became New York.

  Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again — while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting — then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.

  She was thinking of him at the moment the phone rang. And that helped, too, by its immediacy, by its telephonic answer to her wistful wish of remembrance. Memory is a mirage that fools the heart...

  “You’ll never guess what I’m holding in my hand, right while I’m talking to you...

  “I picked it up only a moment ago, and just as I was standing and looking at it, the phone rang. Isn’t that the strangest thing!...

  “Do you remember the day we stopped in and you bought it...

  “I have a little one-room apartment on East Seventieth Street. I’m by myself now, Dorothy stayed on in Rome ...”

  A couple of months later, they were married ...

  ~ * ~

  They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.

  But she failed to add: If you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn’t you be unable to know what the whole thing’s about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name.

  Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexity, tricky at times, but almost always successfully surmounted in one of two ways: either blandly content with the results as they are, or else vaguely discontent but chained by habit. Most women don’t marry a man, they marry a habit. Even when a habit is good, it can become monotonous; most do. When it is bad in just the average degree it usually becomes no more than a nuisance and an irritant; and most do.

  But when it is darkly, starkly evil in the deepest sense of the word, then it can truly become a hell on earth.

  Theirs seemed to fall midway between the first two, for just a little while. Then it started veering over slowly toward the last. Very slowly, at the start, but very steadily...

  ~ * ~

  They spent their hone
ymoon at a New Hampshire lakeshore resort. This lake had an Indian name which, though certainly barbaric in sound to the average English-speaker, in her special case presented such an impassable block both in speech and in mental pre-speech imagery (for some obscure reason, Freudian perhaps, or else simply an instinctive retreat from something with distressful connotations) that she gave up trying to say it and it became simply “the lake.” Then as time drew it backward, not into forgetfulness but into distance, it became “that lake.”

  Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress’s wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don’t show your teeth in remorse.)