Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  Then I heard his voice for the first time. The wiring played it up louder than it really was, like a projection machine. It sounded all hollow and choked. He was asking for a number at the phone. Regency, four-two-eight-one. I whipped a pencil out and scrawled it on my wall.

  “Hello,” he said huskily. “This is Avalon. Can you hear me? I don’t want to talk very loud.” His voice dropped to a mumble, but the wiring didn’t let me down, it came in at ordinary conversational pitch and I could still follow it. “Somebody’s on to us, and we better take a powder out while we still have the chance. I thought I’d let you know, that’s all.” Then he said, “No, no, no, not that at all. If that’s all it was I could get around that with one hand tied behind my back. It’s that other thing. You know, the night three of us went for an airing—and two of us came back. Don’t ask me how I know! I can’t tell you over this phone, there’s someone at the switchboard downstairs. You hang up,” he said, “and stand by. I’ll call you right back. I’ll use the direct wire from the cigar store downstairs, just to be on the safe side.”

  He hung up and I heard him come out and go down the hallway past my door. He sounded in a hurry.

  I didn’t waiste any time. I grabbed my own phone and got Headquarters. “Put Kane on quick, or that other guy working with him. Never mind, you’ll do, whoever you are! It’s on the Mason case and it’s only good for five minutes, it’s got to be worked fast. Trace Regency four-two-eight-one and get whoever you find at the other end; he’s on the line right now getting a call. Get him first and then look up the cases afterwards if you have to. It opened May fifteenth. Never mind who I am or where I am; I’m too busy, got no time to tell you now,” I hung up, opened the door, and went out into the hall.

  I was going to wait for him outside his own door and comer him when he came back, but when I looked I saw that he’d forgotten to close it in his hurry. It stood open on a crack. So I pushed it open and went in, hoping I might find something in the way of evidence to lay my hands on before he had a chance to do away with it. I closed the door after me, so that he wouldn’t notice anything from the other end of the hall and be able to turn back in time.

  The place was just about as I remembered it from the last time I’d been in it. That was only the afternoon before, but it already seemed like a year ago. The liquor he’d braced himself with was standing in a decanter on the table. The bloody parcel from the butcher was lying on the carpet where he’d dropped it. There was a doctor’s kit on the seat of a chair, with a lot of gleaming, sharp-edged little instruments in it. I figured he’d used one of these on Eddie, and all my rage came back. I heard him fitting his key into the outside door, and I jumped back into the bathroom and got behind the shower curtain. I wanted to see what he’d do first, before I nabbed him.

  What gave me time enough to get out of sight was that he was so excited it took him nearly a whole minute to get his key fitted into the keyhole straight enough to get the door open. The bathroom door had a mirror on the outside of it, and I saw his face in that as he went by. It was evil, repulsive; you could tell by his face that his reason was slowly crumbling. He had his mouth open as if he was panting for air. The black beard, short as it was, made him look a little bit like an ape standing on its hind legs. He kept going back and forth, carrying clothes out of the closet. He was getting ready to make another get-away, like that time at the San Pablo. But this time it wasn’t going to work.

  I waited until I heard the latches on his suitcases click shut, and then I stepped softly over the rim of the tub and edged my way to the bathroom door. I got the gun out, flicked open the safety clip and held it in my hand. Then I lounged around the angle of the doorway into the living room, like a lazy comer loafer. He didn’t see me at first. The valises were standing in the middle of the room ready to move out, and he had gone over to the window and was standing looking anxiously out with his back to me. Waiting for his accomplice to stop by with a car and get him, I suppose.

  I was halfway across the room now.

  “You’ve got a visitor, Dr. Avalon,” I said grimly. “Turn around and say hello to Eddie Mason’s brother.”

  I was right in back of him by that time. He twisted around as suddenly as when you crack a whip, and when he saw me his eyes got big. I was holding the gun pressed close up against my side, muzzle trained on him. He saw that too. His face turned gray and he made a strangling sound in his throat, too frightened even to yell. He took a deep breath and I could tell that he was trying to get a grip on himself and pull himself together. Finally he managed to get his voice back to work again. “Who are you? Who’s Eddie Mason? I never—”

  Without taking my eyes off him I gave the bloody package on the floor a shove forward with my foot. “Now do you know why I’m here?”

  He cringed and gibbered at me, more like an ape than ever. “I didn’t know what I was doing! I—I didn’t mean to go that far, something got the better of me. I just meant to frighten him.”

  “Why I don’t let fly and put these six in you is more than I can understand,” I growled. “That’s what I came here for, and the quicker it’s over the better!”

  “I didn’t kill him, though!” he protested. “I didn’t take his life away! You can’t do this to me—”

  “Then you admit you did it, don’t you? That’s no news to me—but we’re not going to keep it a secret between you and me and Regency four-two-eight-one. Get a piece of paper and write down what I tell you to—and then after you’ve signed it, we’ll see. I’m giving you more of a break than you deserve; you ought to be stepped on like a toad and squashed!”

  “Yes, yes, anything—I’ll do anything you say,” he murmured. He was drooling with relief. He gestured vaguely to the back of me, “There’s a pen and paper—on that desk right behind you, just hand them to me—”

  I should have remembered that there wasn’t any; I’d come by there only a moment ago. I should have remembered there was a streak of insanity in him, and that always makes for greater cleverness when they’re cornered than a normal person shows. But he caught me off my guard, and I half-turned to reach behind me.

  Instantly there was a blinding flash of light and something broke all over my head and shoulders. The decanter, I suppose, that had been standing on the table alongside of us. But he must have had it ready in his hand for several moments past without my realizing it, to be able to bring it down so quickly. And at the same time he gripped me by the wrist so suddenly with his other hand, and wrenched it around so violently, that there wasn’t even time to flex the trigger finger, and the gun went spinning loosely out of my hand as though I had been twirling it around on one finger.

  The last thing I was conscious of was a dull thud somewhere across the room as it landed harmlessly on the carpet. I went out like a light, with whiskey, or maybe it was blood, streaming down into my ears and eyes.

  VI

  When my head cleared and I came to, I was no longer flat on the floor, but upright in a chair. Each ankle was tied to a leg of it by long strips torn from a shirt or piece of underwear. I was sitting on my own hands and they were fastened to the seat of it in some ingenious way—I think by another long strip running around the whole chair and passing under my body.

  The position was a torture to my bent wrists, especially the one he had sprained. What I mistook at first for a fuzzy taste in my mouth turned out to be a gag loosely stuffed into it. I could see the gun out of the comer of my eye, still lying where it had fallen. I was thankful for a minute that he hadn’t picked it up and turned it on me. Then, as I concentrated my full attention on him, something told me I was wrong about that—it might have been better for me if he had.

  He had his back to me and I didn’t know what he was doing at first. Or rather, my mind didn’t know yet, but my instincts seemed to, beforehand. The way animals know things. The short hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and my heart was icy. My breath was coming like a bellows. He had a bright white light on, some kind of an adj
ustable doctor’s lamp, like the time Eddie had caught sight of him working over that woman. That didn’t frighten me. He kept making little clinking sounds, as if he was picking up and putting down metal instruments one by one. That didn’t frighten me much either, although I began to have an inkling of what was up.

  He wouldn’t dare, I told myself. He wouldn’t be crazy enough to! I wasn’t Eddie, shanghaied off in the middle of the night without even a look at who had done it. We were in a hotel with hundreds of people all around us. We were in rooms he had been known to occupy for months past. Anything that happened here would point right at him. If he left me here his number was up, and on the other hand there was no way of getting me out of the place without being seen.

  But when he turned around and looked at me, I knew he would dare. He’d dare anything. Not because he didn’t know any better, but simply because he’d lost all caution. What the lamp and the metal instruments hadn’t been able to do, one look at his sleepy eyes did.

  Then I knew fear. I was in the presence of full-fledged insanity. Maybe it had always been there and he’d kept it covered up. Maybe the fright I’d given him before had brought it out in him at last. But there it was, staring me in the face and horrible to look at. Vacant eyes and an absent-minded smile that never changed. So peaceful, so gentle, like a kind-hearted old family doctor pottering around.

  I sat there helpless, like a spectator at a show. And what a show! What frightened me more than anything else was to watch the deliberate, cold-blooded professional way he was saturating a number of pads with disinfectant. I would have given anything now if he had only used the gun on me. It would have been better than what was coming. I heard and whipped myself around and fell over side-ways with the chair, giving myself another knock on the head. But I was too frightened to pass out any more. He came over and lifted me up and stood me straight again, chair and all, gently, almost soothingly, as if I was a kid with the colic.

  “Don’t be impatient,” he said softly. “It will be over soon. I’m almost ready for you now.”

  If it’s going to be like what happened to Eddie, I prayed desperately, let his hand slip and make it the throat instead!

  He brought out a newspaper and spread it on the floor all around me.

  “That will catch any drops that fall,” he purred. “I used one with your brother too. It’s the best absorbent there is.”

  The sweat was running down my face in streams by this time. The whole thing was like a bad dream. He had a number of sharp little scalpels laid out in a row on the table and they gleamed under the light. He selected one, breathed lovingly on it, and then turned around and came back to me, smiling dreamily.

  “I suppose it’s wrong of me not to use chloroform,” he said, “but that’s what you get for coming to me after office hours!” And then he suddenly broke out into an insane hysterical laugh that just about finished me. “Now, my friend,” he said, “here’s how we do it.” He reached down and daintily plucked at the gag until he had drawn it all out of my mouth.

  I had been waiting for that, it was the only chance I had. I let out the loudest yell that that hotel room or any other had ever heard. Tied up as I was, it actually lifted me an inch or two above the chair, I put such volume into it. What it would have sounded like in my own room, had anyone been there to hear it, I can only imagine.

  He gripped me cruelly by the lower jaw and pulled it down until I thought it would fracture, so that I couldn’t yell any more. Then with his other elbow he pressed my forehead and the upper part of my face back flat. I couldn’t close my mouth and my head was held in a vise. One whole arm was still free from the elbow down, remember, even if it didn’t have much room to swing in. And that was the one that held the scalpel. I saw the shiny thing flash before my face as he turned it to get a better leverage. I was pretty far gone, but not far enough. I knew I was going to feel everything that was going to happen.

  “What’s going on in here?” a voice asked somewhere in back of me. Not a very excited voice either. He let go of me and straightened up.

  “How dare you come in here without knocking while I am treating one of my patients?” I heard him say. My luck was that I hadn’t passed out a minute ago, as frightened as I was. His voice carried so much conviction and dignity he might have gotten away with it, whether I was tied or not. I couldn’t yell any more, I couldn’t even talk, but I showed whoever it was in the only way I could. I tipped myself over and hit the floor once more, and threshed around there trying to free myself.

  I stayed conscious but everything around me was a blur for several minutes. When it came back in focus again I was standing up and my bonds had been loosened. They were all standing around me, the manager, the hotel detective, the porter, and everyone else.

  “Did you get that guy?” was the first thing I asked. They shook their heads. Someone motioned and I turned around and looked.

  The window was wide open, and the curtains were hanging on the outside of the sill instead of on the inside, as though something heavy had dragged them across it. Down below on the street you could hear some woman screaming, and people were running up from all directions.

  “Better so,” I said as I turned back to them. “It’s a good thing you came when you did,” I told the hotel dick. “How did it happen?”

  He looked embarrassed.

  “Well, you see,” he stammered, “we happened to be in your room at the time—er—investigating that hook-up of yours, which had been reported to us by the maid, and we heard something going on in here through the wall. But until you gave that loud yell we thought he was just treating a patient. Even then we weren’t sure, until I opened the door with a passkey and took a look.”

  “Well,” I said, “outside of a sprained wrist, a stiff jaw and a bump on the head I feel a lot better than I would’ve if you hadn’t showed up.”

  There was a commotion at the door and Kane’s partner came hustling in, by himself. “We got that guy at Regency 428, and he broke like a toothpick! He’s a hophead the doctor’s been supplying and he drove the car that night—”

  As I was leaving I stuck my tongue out at him, to everyone’s surprise. “Just wanted to show you I’ve still got it,” I said. I never liked that guy.

  I stopped in at the hospital to see Eddie. He saw the plaster on my scalp and the gauze around my wrist and we just looked at each other quietly.

  “It’s all right, kid,” I said after awhile. “Everything’s all right— now.”

  It will be, too. They have artificial fingers these days that are as good as the real ones. And a man can become a good electrician without—having to talk very much.

  (1934)

  Preview of Death

  It was what somebody or other has called life’s darkest moment. My forehead was dripping perspiration and I stared miserably down at the floor. “But, Chief,” I said when he got all through thundering at me, “all I had was a couple of beers and besides I wasn’t on duty at the time. And how was I to know that that wasn’t the right way out of the place? I only found out it was a plate-glass window when I came through on the other side of it. And my gun didn’t go off, you can look for yourself. It was some car out in the street that back-fired just then and made everybody clear out in such a hurry. You’re not going to break me for that, are you?”

  “No,” he said, “but I’m going to give you a nice quiet assignment that’ll keep you out of trouble for awhile. You’re going to look after Martha Meadows from now on, she’s been getting threatening letters and her studio just called and asked us to furnish her with protection. That’s you until further orders.”

  “I resign,” I said when I heard that.

  He switched his cigar from the left-hand comer to the right-hand comer without putting a finger to it, leaned half-way across his desk at me, and went into another electrical storm. A lot of fist-pounding on the mahogany went with it. You couldn’t hear yourself think, he was making that much noise. “Resign? You can’t resign! Ove
r my dead body you’ll resign! What d’ya think this squad is, a game of in-again out-again Finnigan?”

  “But—but Chief,” I pleaded, “bodyguard to a—a movie actress! All the rest of the boys will laugh at me, I’ll never be able to live it down! And what’ll the wife say? Dock me, break me—anything but that!”

  He rattled some papers around and held them up in front of his face. Maybe to keep from weakening, I don’t know. ”Ahem —now not another word out of you, Galbraith. Off you go. Get right out there and don’t let her out of your sight until further notice. Remember, your job isn’t to trace these threats or track down whoever sent ‘em, it’s just to keep your eye on Martha Meadows and see that nothing happens to her. You’re responsible for her safety.”

  “O.K., Chief,” I sighed, “but I really should be wearing a dog collar.”

  No doubt about it, I was the unhappiest, most miserable detective that ever started out on an assignment as I walked out of headquarters that day and got in a taxi. The sooner I got busy on the job, I figured, the sooner the chief might relent and take me off it. The taxi, and everything else from now on, was at Miss Meadows’ own personal expense, but that didn’t make me like her any the better. Without actually wishing her any harm, I was far from being a fan of hers at the moment.

  The studio, on Marathon Street, looked more like a library than anything else from the outside. The gateman picked up a phone, said: “From headquarters, to see Miss Meadows,” and everything opened up high, wide and handsome. I passed from hand to hand like a volley-ball getting to her; and all of them, from the gateman right on up, seemed glad that I had been sent over to look after her. You could tell she was well liked.

  She was in her bungalow dressing-room resting between scenes and having her lunch when they brought me in. Her lunch was a malted milk and a slice of sponge cake—not enough to keep a canary alive. She had a thick make-up on, but even at that she still looked like somebody’s twelve-year-old sister. You sort of wanted to protect her and be her big brother the minute you set eyes on her, even if you hadn’t been sent there for just that purpose—the way I had. “I’m Jimmy Galbraith from headquarters, Miss Meadows,” I said.