Tales for a Stormy Night: Fifteen Crime Stories

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I’ll try,” Mrs. Norris said. A watchmaker.

  The warning buzzer sounded within the theater. The lights flickered.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” the woman said, and picked up the box. “I’ve brought some violets for the leading lady. I want to take them in before curtain. Wouldn’t it be nice if she invited us to see the play? I shan’t accept unless she invites both of us.”

  Mrs. Norris followed the woman down the alleyway and then hung back as she handed the box in at the stage door. The woman waited and, observing Mrs. Norris, nodded to her confidently. Mrs. Norris was only reasonably sure the box was empty. She was beset by doubts and fears. Was there such a thing as a featherweight bomb? The doorman returned and put something in the woman’s hand. She bowed and scraped and came along, tucking whatever she’d got into her purse.

  With Mr. Jarvis in the theater, Mrs. Norris was not going to take any chances. “Wait for me out front,” she said. “I want to have a look in there myself.”

  “Too late, too late,” the woman crowed.

  Mrs. Norris hurried.

  “No one’s allowed backstage now, ma’am,” the doorman said.

  “That box the old woman gave you…” It was sitting on a desk almost within her reach. “It could be dangerous.”

  “Naw. She’s harmless, that old fraud. There’s nothing in it but tissue paper. She comes round every opening night. ‘Flowers for Miss Hayes,’ or Miss Tandy or whoever. The company manager gives her a dollar for luck. I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to go now.”

  Mrs. Norris beat a dignified retreat. The old woman was nowhere to be seen. But a watchmaker on Forty-seventh Street…Forty-seventh Street was also the diamond center of New York. What a lovely place for a leisurely walk-through with Mr. Tully!

  1959

  Meeting at the Crossroad

  IT WAS A NIGHT of fitful winds, so quiet at times the fall of an acorn might have startled a listener. Then the wind would commence again, whispering at first, trembling the dead leaves; then it would rise to a wanton shriek that rattled the very stars, it seemed. And that fury spent, silence hung once more upon the mountainside. It was the sort of night that a man abroad in it was not likely to forget. It could make strangers of friends, and perhaps friends of strangers.

  Two men surprised each other, meeting on the Upper Road well after midnight. One was walking south from the direction of Rossi’s Tavern, although it was unlikely that he had come from there: Rossi was in the habit of closing at midnight sharp. The other man, Tom Sommers, was coming east, down Cemetery Road. They were only a few feet apart when both of them hesitated, and then, having recognized each other, came on to their inevitable meeting at the crossroad. There a great naked light bulb shone beneath a porcelain shield which resembled an upside-down spittoon.

  Both men lived in the village below, Point True, and they rode the same commuters’ bus into New York every day. Outside of that, and this chance meeting, they had little in common. Yet, about to pass each other with the merest of greetings, both men paused, and on an impulse each felt had come from the other’s prompting, extended their hands.

  The handshake was brief, but it was their only one in fifteen years of acquaintance.

  “Going down?” Tom Sommers said.

  “No, worse luck. Up again. My wife’s still at the Shanleys’.” Allan Ford jerked his head in the direction of Cemetery Road, the same road down which Sommers had just walked.

  There were a few houses along the road—not many, because so few people could afford the search for water on the mountainside. Many a well-digging had had to be abandoned at that height, and with it the plans to build a house.

  “Nice people though,” Ford added, as though to amend what might have been taken as criticism. The Shanley house was the only one alight now, except for what seemed to be a night lamp burning at the Rossi window.

  “Are they?” Sommers said. It was not a question. It was an avowal of his skepticism of the Shanleys as nice people, and of Ford himself, perhaps. By reputation Sommers was a sour man.

  “Once in a while anyway,” Ford said, rubbing the back of his neck. It was an old mannerism, always practised to the tune of a sly joke. “Here comes the wind again. Isn’t it something?”

  “You should hear it at the top of the mountain,” Sommers said, and without so much as a gesture of farewell he strode off down the hill.

  At the very end of Cemetery Road, in the long plateau atop the mountain, his wife was buried. She had died a good many years before, at the age of twenty-three…

  Both men were on the eight o’clock bus in the morning. Sommers boarded it first because he lived farther north, and as was his habit, he sat beside the person least likely to attempt conversation. He was tight-lipped and somber-eyed, reportedly a fine engraver. He looked rather like an ascetic monk. But any comment about him among the commuters almost invariably centered about his daughter. Ellen was fifteen now, in her third year at the Township high school, an honor student, and a very sweet-dispositioned girl. She was quite popular despite her shyness. Nearly everyone considered it a miracle she had been so well brought-up without a woman’s help.

  Ford was not his usual hearty self that morning, but his explanation was familiar: “I wish to God we could get to bed nights.” He and Sommers did not even greet each other, much less comment on their post-midnight encounter. There was nothing at all out of the way about the bus trip that morning.

  By the time most of the same commuters met again on the 5:15 bus, northbound, an item in the afternoon newspapers—or in some cases, a call from home—provoked a fury of talk; Point True had been the scene of a brutal murder shortly after midnight the night before. Fred Rossi had been bludgeoned to death in the woods between his tavern on the Upper Road and his home on Cemetery Hill.

  Tom Sommers looked up from his newspaper at precisely the moment Ford was moving past him. Their eyes met and held for an instant, and Ford thought about their handshake of the night before—after the murder had occurred. But not a word was exchanged between them.

  Ford’s wife was on the telephone when he got home. It gave him a moment he very much needed—a chance to be alone on familiar ground. He was aware of something shaky inside him. God knows, the sensation was common enough to an advertising man, this inner quaking. In his case, he thought, it usually portended a responsibility he did not want, a decision he did not want to make.

  He wandered through the house and lingered a moment at the playroom door. Jeff was fond of cowboys again, judging by the television program that was on. He waved absently in response to Allan’s “Hi, son.”

  Martha, off the phone, called out, “Allan?”

  He returned to the kitchen. “Hi, honey.”

  “I suppose you’ve heard about Rossi?”

  He nodded. “It’s in the afternoon papers.”

  “Did you hear anything on the bus?”

  “Gossip, you mean?”

  “All right then—gossip.”

  Martha had a way of coaxing almost everything he knew out of him, and he resented it even while surrendering. The worst of it was that once she got hold of it, what he had to tell always seemed unimportant. She was a frighteningly digestive woman.

  “Doc Rathensberger calls it the violent demise of one more blackguardly scoundrel,” Allan said.

  “It takes one to know one from what I’ve heard about Doc Rathensberger,” Martha commented.

  Allan shrugged. Doc’s florid turn of phrase had rather appealed to him.

  “Chief Kelley was here this afternoon, corroborating—is that the word?—Jack Shanley’s statement.”

  “What did Jack say?”

  “That we were guests there last night…who stayed until two thirty, and that we didn’t hear anything unusual.”

  “I wish we hadn’t stayed so late. I’ll bet we wouldn’t be asked to either if Jack had to ride the damned bus in every day.” Shanley drove his own car into New York. “It’s enough to kill a
man.” Allan was talking quickly. It had become a way of his—to cover with patter what he felt to be his slow process of reasoning. Apparently he had not been missed in the half hour or so he had been gone from the Shanley house.

  “I don’t think either Jack or I mentioned your having fallen asleep in the kitchen.”

  “Thanks,” he said dryly. He could picture Martha lifting that proud chin of hers when Shanley observed: “Your husband’s off again.” He had tried not to fall asleep last night, though the practice was not uncommon to him. The Shanley’s had an open kitchen grate, and a cat that lazed in a chair before it. Allan often retreated to its company when he’d had too much to drink and the talk got up to his ears. After midnight, Martha always seemed at her best, sharp, her humor brittle as ice. Listening to her and Jack—he was a criminal lawyer, and a brilliant one—was like following a tennis match by ear. Along about then, Allan’s own humor had as much bounce as a wet rag.

  “Does Kelley want my corroboration, too?” he asked.

  “I don’t suppose it’s necessary,” Martha said. She took a meat loaf from the oven to baste, but suddenly looked up from it. “Or did you hear something, Allan?”

  “How could I when I was asleep?” he said, avoiding her eyes.

  “So was Anna Rossi—at least, that’s her story. She’s supposed to have taken a sleeping pill, turned on some music, and gone to sleep by it. She didn’t miss her husband until nine o’clock this morning.”

  Allan, walking past the Rossi house, had heard the music, and he had speculated all day, until he had heard of Rossi’s murder, whether or not Tom Sommers might have been coming from there when they met at the crossroad. He had felt on their meeting that Sommers was not his usual dour self, that something had just given him one hell of a lift. And Allan had enjoyed this speculation. For one thing, he liked Anna Rossi. She was a big, affable woman who wore her sexual attractiveness like a cloak to warm a cold world. The vulgar talk around the village asked what Rossi expected: his own infidelities were common knowledge.

  Strangely, Allan had met Anna Rossi at the Shanleys’. It was to Betty Shanley’s credit, he thought, having Mrs. Rossi in their house. She was less their type than Allan himself. But then, Betty was a jabberer, and Allan supposed Anna Rossi made a good listener—and, he had thought since last night—perhaps a good mistress to Tom Sommers. Allan had worked it all out, the relationship between the widower and the attractive woman. It would account for Sommer’s aloofness from village gossip; it might even explain his daughter Ellen’s getting along so well without a mother.

  With the news of Rossi’s murder, however, he tried to suppress that whole line of speculation. After all, what would Sommers have been doing at the Rossi house at an hour when Fred Rossi ordinarily would have been coming home from work? Unless…Allan shook off the new surmise as unfair and unfounded, and a lot too dangerous to think about a man he didn’t know any better than he did Sommers.

  Martha eased the meat loaf back into the oven. “I’d say she was the last person in the world to need a sleeping pill, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Allan said, trying to catch up with his wife’s thinking. “Some of the easiest talking people churn up inside.”

  “Men find her attractive, don’t they?” Martha said.

  Allan shrugged.

  “Have you ever been in their house?” she persisted.

  “What the hell would I be doing there?”

  Martha laughed. “I don’t know. I was just remembering that time you walked her home from the Shanleys’. It was you, wasn’t it? Oh, Lord, Allan, I’m not accusing you of anything.” She was on the verge of genuine mirth.

  “I know you’re not,” he said irritably. He could not help feeling that there was something belittling in her taking him for granted so completely. “But you don’t have to treat me like old dog Trey.”

  Martha sighed, her mirth vanished, and took the ice cubes from the refrigerator. “Will you make us a drink, dear?”

  He got the ice bucket, and was gone from the room a few moments, getting the gin and vermouth.

  “Allan, I’ve decided not to go to the Shanley’s again for a while,” she said when he returned.

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t really enjoy it, do you?”

  “Not much. That’s the truth. It’s pretty rough for a man to know he’s accepted in a place only because his wife’s so much brighter than he is. Jack makes no bones about his contempt. And sometimes, when we’re there, you don’t either.”

  “Now, that isn’t true, Allan. That’s just something in your own imagination that pops out when you’ve had a bad day. I know exactly when it happens—it comes out when your jokes go flat. Those silly wisecracks of yours—when they’re bad, they’re horrible, Allan. And even when they’re good, they have a way of killing a conversation.”

  “They must be pretty rotten most of the time considering that the conversation doesn’t usually begin to lag till two thirty in the morning.”

  “I didn’t think it was that late,” she said.

  And so they were diverted from a growing quarrel. He twisted the lemon peels on top of their martinis, then touched his glass to hers.

  “To us,” Martha said. “I promise, no more late nights.” She sipped her drink. “They say Kelley’s volunteer police have messed things up again. Remember the drug store man last year?”

  Allan nodded. It was closer to two years ago, but the Point True pharmacist had been murdered in his shop, a boxful of change had been taken by his attacker, and, it had been said, the murderer’s tracks covered by the local investigators, presumably while investigating. The crime was still unsolved.

  “They’re saying the same thing’s happened again—the temporary police threshing around the woods, looking for clues. As Jack said when he was trying to find him up there—and it seems to have caught on with everybody—‘Has anybody here seen Kelley?’”

  “When did you see Jack?”

  “I didn’t. I talked to Betty on the telephone. Allan, you don’t think that Jack and I—that there’s anything between us, do you?”

  “No, I guess not,” he said, and such a thought had never stayed very long in his mind, not really. “If there was, you wouldn’t talk so much, the two of you.”

  “That’s an interesting observation.”

  “My God, though, Martha—his own wife never shuts up. How does the man take it?”

  “Very easily. Sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t.” She went to the door and called out, “Jeff, five minutes. Wash up for dinner.”

  Tom Sommers, getting off the bus at his own gate, felt that his house was empty, and the cold fear got to him that never again would it hold Ellen and himself as it had, happily, for as much of the child’s life as she could remember. Even if the Rossi business affected them no further…

  They had had their breakfast in the usual manner, only a little of the strain between them showing, both seeming to pretend that nothing unusual had happened the evening before. It seemed best, by unspoken mutual consent, to carry this day on like all the others.

  Only when he had been about to leave the house and paused to kiss her cheek, as was their custom, had the difference now between them been manifest: he sensed the little stiffening in her body as he came near her—and he had gone no nearer, saying his “Goodbye, my dear,” to the back of her head, and getting a far too gay to be genuine, “Goodbye, papa.” How ironic, he had thought then, if he were to become the principal object of her resentment.

  But at breakfast time Ellen had not known that Rossi was dead. He was no longer as sure of it then himself as he had been the night before.

  In the house he found a note from Ellen: she would soon be home, but in the meantime would he please set the oven at 350 degrees and put in the casserole which Sylvia had left? (Sylvia was the woman who worked for them by the day.) How like any other day’s note this one read, and how almighty unlike other days the day itself had been!
<
br />   And must continue to be. Sommers knew his own moment of decision was almost on him. There were at least two people who would suggest his name to Chief of Police Kelley as a likely suspect for the murder of Rossi.

  He lighted and set the stove…Allan Ford—who was he, really? What kind of man was he beneath the clown that he played as endlessly as a child at being a grownup? What did he see when he shaved himself? Someone, Sommers thought, he wasn’t very fond of. Yet out of all that heavy-drinking, loose-mouthed crowd who chummed together on the bus, Ford was the only man Sommers cared a second thought about. Ford might not like what he was, but he didn’t complain in public about it, or of his job, his clients, or the squandering of his talents in the market place.

  But how curious to have met him at the crossroad after the murder! Ford had come down the road from the direction of the tavern, a tavern closed at least an hour by then, as Sommers himself knew. What kind of mission had sent Ford out on the desolate road at such an hour? Ford was not a walker as Sommers himself was by nature.

  His wife was at the Shanleys’, he’d said—his pretty, bauble-minded wife whom he must have thought he had won by a miracle the day she consented to marry him. That whole crowd, Sommers thought, like most American males, married from the neck down.

  The phone rang, jangling every nerve in his body. But it was Ellen. Would he mind terribly if she did not come home for dinner? Cathie Rapp had asked her…He minded; and also he did not mind because, he decided, it indicated an answer to a question foremost in his dilemma: he would say now that Ellen did not know he had gone out before last midnight and returned home well after one A.M.

  But whether she knew it or not, the fact remained. He had gone up to Rossi’s; he had had motive to kill Rossi; and Rossi was dead.

  Even Kelley could add that up to an indictment, and he would want to quickly, being still under fire for the drug store fiasco. This was the dilemma: if he confided in the police, might he not be merely sacrificing himself to them?

  Somewhere in the hour during which he chopped wood, washed, and ate a meager supper, the idea took hold of him that it was a problem needful of a lawyer’s advice.