Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics

by Woolrich, Cornell

  I picked up the room phone and asked for our number. It was taking a slight chance, but it was better than letting her give herself away; she might stand by the brightly-lighted window looking up and down the street for me, in full view of anyone happening along. He put through the call for me. It rang just once at our end, where she and I lived, and then was promptly answered—much quicker than Ethel ever got to it.

  A deep bass voice said: “Yeah?” I nearly fainted. “Yeah? What is it?” the voice said a second time. I pulled myself together again. “I’m calling Saxony 4230,” I said impatiently. “They’ve given me the wrong num—Damn that skirt-chasing clerk downstairs.”

  The answer came back, “This is Saxony 4230. What is it?” I put out one hand and leaned groggily against the table, without letting go the receiver. “Who are you?” I managed to articulate.

  “I’m a patrolman,” he boomed back.

  My face was getting wetter by the minute. “Wh-what’s up?” I choked.

  “You a friend of the Lynches? They’ve just had a death here.” Then in the background, over and above his voice, came a woman’s screams—screams of agony from some other room, carried faintly over the wire. Blurred and distorted as they were, I recognized them; they were Ethel’s. A second feminine voice called out more distinctly, presumably to the cop I was talking to: “Get her some spirits of ammonia or something to quiet her!” One of the neighbors, called in in the emergency.

  Pop! went my whole scheme, like a punctured balloon. My body had already been found down by the tracks. A cop had already broken the news to her. He and the ministering neighbor were witnesses to the fact that she hadn’t run off and left me before I did it. For that matter, the whole apartment building must be hearing her screams.

  The entire set-up shifted back again into its first arrangement, and left me where I’d been before. She couldn’t leave town now, not for days, not until after the funeral anyway. The affair at the tracks was an accident once more, not a suicide. I daren’t try to get word to her now, after making her go through this. She’d either give herself away in her relief, or uncontrollable anger at finding out might make her turn on me intentionally and expose me.

  “Just a friend of theirs,” I was saying, or something like that. “I’ll call up tomorrow, I guess—”

  “Okay,” he said, and I heard the line click at the other end.

  I forked the receiver as though it weighed a ton and slumped down next to it. It took me a little time to get my breathing back in shape. There was only one thing to do now—get out of town by myself without her. To stay on indefinitely was to invite being recognized by someone sooner or later, and the longer I stayed the greater the chances were of that happening. I’d blow to New York tonight. I’d use Kelly’s ticket, get the Flyer that passed through at midnight.

  I stealthily eased the chair away from under the doorknob, picked up the bag, unlocked the door, gave it a push. As though it was wired to set off some kind of an alarm, the phone began to ring like fury just as the door swung out. I stood there thunderstruck for a minute. They’d traced my call back! Maybe Ethel had recovered enough to ask them to find out who it was, or maybe the way I’d hung up had looked suspicious. Let it ring its head off. I wasn’t going near it. I was getting out of here while the gettingout was good! I hotfooted it down the hall, its shrill clamor behind me.

  Just before I got to the turn in the hallway, the elevator-slide sloshed open. I stopped dead in my tracks. I could hear footsteps coming toward me along the carpet, softened to a shuffle. I hesitated for a minute, then ducked back, to wait for whoever it was to go by. I closed the door zifter me, stood listening by it. The bell was still ding-donging in back of me. The knock, when it came, was on my own door, and sent a quiver racing through me. I started to back away slowly across the room, bag still in my hand. The knock came again.

  “What is it?” I called out.

  It was the old colored man’s whine. “Mista Kelly, somebody wants you on de foam pow’ful bad. We done tole ‘em you must be asleep if’n you don’t answer, but dey say wake you up. Dey say dey know you dere—”

  I set the bag down noiselessly, looked at the window. No soap, six stories above the street and no fire-escape, regulations to the contrary. The damn phone kept bleating away there inside the room, nearly driving me crazy.

  “Mista Kelly—” he whined again.

  I pulled myself together; a voice on the phone wasn’t going to kill me. “All right,” I said curtly.

  If they knew I was here, then they knew I was here. I’d bluff it out—be a friend of the late Lynch’s that his wife had never heard about. I took in a chestful of air, bent down and said, “Yep?”

  The second word out of the receiver, I knew that it was no check-up on the call I’d made ten minutes ago. The voice was very cagey, almost muffled.

  “Gretting restless, Hogan?” I lowered my own to match it. Hogan?

  First I was L3nrich, then I was Kelly, now I was Hogan! But it wasn’t much trouble to figure out Kelly and Hogan wore the same pair of shoes; Fd never had much confidence in the names on hotel-blotters in the first place.

  “Sorta,” I shadow-boxed. “Kelly’s the name, though.”

  The voice went in for irony by the shovelful. “So we noticed,” he drawled. Meaning about my being restless, evidently, and not what my name was. “You got so restless you were figuring on taking a little trip, without waiting for your friends, is that it? Seems you even walked down to the depot, asking about trains, and bought yourself a ticket ahead of time. I had a phone call from somebody that saw you, about eight this evening. I s’pose you woulda just taken an overnight bag—” A pause. “—a little black bag, and hopped aboard.”

  So others beside Kelly knew what was in that Gladstone! Nice cheering thought.

  The voice remonstrated with a feline purr: “You shouldn’t be so impatient. You knew we were coming. You shoulda given us more time. We only got in late this afternoon.” Another pause. “Tire trouble on the way. We woulda felt very bad to have missed you. It woulda inconvenienced us a lot. You see, you’ve got my razor in your bag, and some shirts and socks belonging to some of the other boys. Now, we’d like to get everything sorted out before you go ahead on any little trips because, if you just go off like that without letting us know, never can tell when you’d be coming back.”

  I could almost feel the threat that lurked under the slurring surface of the words flash out of the receiver into my ear like a steel blade. He was talking in code, but the code wasn’t hard to decipher; wasn’t meant to be. They wanted a split of what was in the black bag; maybe they were entitled to it, maybe they weren’t, but they sounded like they were going to get it, whoever they were. Kelly, I gathered, had been on the point of continuing his travels without waiting for that little formality—only he’d taken the back way to and from the depot to avoid being seen, had been seen anyway, and then a freight train had come along and saved him any further trouble. But since I was now Kelly, his false move had gotten me in bad and it was up to me to do the worrying for him.

  I hadn’t said two words so far; hadn’t had a chance to. I already had a dim suspicion in the back of my mind about where, or rather how, all that crisp new money had been obtained. But that thought could wait until later. I had no time just now to bother with it. All I knew was there wasn’t going to be any split, big or little; just one look at my face was all they needed and I’d be left with only memories.

  I had one trump-card though: they couldn’t tag me. I could walk right by them with the whole satchelful of dough and they wouldn’t know the difference. All I needed was to stall a little, to keep them from coming up here.

  “You’ve got me wrong,” I murmured into the phone. “I wouldn’t think of keeping anyone’s razors or shirts or socks—”

  “Can’t hear you,” he said. “Take the handkerchief off the thing, you don’t need it.” He’d noticed the difference in voices and thought I was using a filter to disguise
mine.

  “You do the talking,” I suggested. “It was your nickel.”

  “We don’t talk so good with our mouths,” he let me know. “We talk better with other things. You know where to find us. All that was arranged, but you got a poor memory, it looks like. Check out and come on over here—with everything. Then we’ll all see you off on the train, after everything’s straightened out.”

  Another of those threats flashed out. I sensed instinctively what Kelly’s “seeing off’ would be like if he had been fool enough to go near them at this point. He was in too bad to redeem himself. He’d never make that New York train standing on his own feet.

  “How soon you want me to be over?” I stalled.

  The purr left the voice at this point. “We’ll give you thirty minutes.” Then, while the fact that a net was closing in on me slowly sank in, he went on: “I wouldn’t try to make the depot without stopping by here first. Couple of the boys are hanging around there in the car. They like to watch people get off the trains. They like to watch them get off much better than they like to watch ‘em get on, funny isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, funny,” I agreed dismally.

  “You’re in 601, over at that dump,” he told me. “You can see the street from there. Step over to the window for a minute, I’ll hold the wire—” I put down the receiver, edged up to the window, took a tuck in the dusty net curtains and peered down. It was a side-street, not the one the hotel entrance faced on. But at the comer, which commanded both the window and the entrance, a neghgent figure slouched under the white sputtering arc-light, hat-brim down, idly scanning a newspaper. While I watched he raised his head, saw me with the light behind me, stared straight up at the window. Unmistakably my window and no other. I let the curtains spread out again, went back to the phone.

  “Like the view?” the voice at the other end suggested. “Nice quiet street, hardly anyone on it, right?”

  “Nice quiet street, hardly anyone on it,” I intoned dazedly.

  “Then we’ll be seeing you in—twenty-five minutes now.” The line clicked closed, but not quickly enough to cut off a smothered monosyllable. “Rat,” it had sounded like. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it was, old-fashioned and overworked as the expression was.

  All of which left me pretty well holed-in. I knew the penalty now for trying to get on the New York train, or any other. I knew the penalty for simply walking away from the hotel in the wrong direction. I knew the penalty for everything in fact but one thing—for staying exactly where I was and not budging.

  And what else could that be but a little surprise visit on their part, preferably in the early morning hours? This place was a pushover with just a night clerk and an old myopic colored man. I certainly couldn’t afford to call in police protection beforehand any more than the real Kelly could have.

  There was always the alternative of dropping the bag out the window and letting that finger-man out there pick it up and walk off with it intact, but I wasn’t quite yellow enough to go for that idea. Forty-five grand was forty-five grand; why should a voice on the wire and a lizard on a street corner dish me out of it? The postman may knock twice, but not Opportunity.

  The obvious thing was to get out of 601 in a hurry. I split the phone for the third time that night. “This is Kelly, six-one. I’d like my room changed. Can you gimme an inside room on the top floor?”

  The broad I’d seen him with must have put him in good humor. “That shouldn’t be hard,” he said. “I’ll send the key up.”

  “Here’s the idea,” I went on. “I want this transfer kept strictly between you and me, I don’t want it on the blotter. Anyone stops by, I’m in 601 as far as you know. They don’t find me there, then I’m not in the building.”

  “I don’t see how I can do that, we’ve got to keep the record straight,” he said for a come-on.

  “I’m sending a sealed envelope down to you,” I said. “You open it personally. I’ll keep 601—keep paying for it—if that’ll make it easier for you. I’m in a little personal trouble, wife after me. Don’t want any callers. You play along with me and you won’t come out the short end. Send Rastus up with the key.”

  “I’m your man,” he said. When the old darky knocked I left the black bag in the closet, locked 601 after me and took the key with me. The lights were out and he didn’t notice the dummy I’d formed out of Kelly’s shirts under the bedding. Nor the bulge all those packages of twenties gave my person. The bag was full of toilet-paper to give it the right weight if snatched up in a hurry. They wouldn’t be likely to show their faces a second time after filling a perfectly good mattress with lead in the middle of the night and rousing the whole hotel. Kelly’s dandy little gun I took with me.

  He showed me into a place on the eighth floor back with a window that looked out on a blank brick shaft, and I had him wait outside the door for a minute. I put three of the twenties into an envelope, sealed it for the clerk, and told him to take it down to him.

  “Yessa, Mr. Kelly,” he bobbed.

  “No, Mr. Kelly’s down in 601, there’s no one in this room,” I told him, and I gave him a twenty for himself “You ask your boss downstairs if you don’t believe me. He’ll put you right. You didn’t show me up here; this is so you remember that.” His eyes bulged when he looked at the tip.

  “Yas, sir!” he yammered.

  I locked the door, but didn’t bother with any mere chair this time. I sealed it up with a big top-heavy chest of drawers that weighed a ton. The room had its own bath. I stretched out on the bed fully dressed with the money still on me and the gun under my pillow and lay there in the dark waiting.

  I didn’t have such a long wait at that. The firecrackers went off at about three in the morning. I could hear it plainly two floors above, where I was. It sounded like the guts were being blown out of the building. The shots came so close together I couldn’t count them; there must have been three or four revolvers being emptied at one time. All into Kelly’s rolled-up shirts, in the dark.

  The whole thing was over within five minutes, less than that. Then, minutes after, like one last firecracker on the string going off, there came a single shot, much further away this time. It sounded as though it came from the lobby—either a cop had tried to head them off, or they’d taken care of the clerk on their way out.

  The keening of police-cars, whistling up from all directions at once, jerked me upright on the bed. I hadn’t thought of that. They’d want to know what all the shooting was for. They’d want to ask the guy who’d been in 601 a lot of questions, especially after they saw the proxy he’d left on the bed to take his medicine for him. They’d want to know why and wherefore, and how come all that money, and the nice shiny gun, was it licensed? Lots and lots of questions, that Kelly-Hogan-Lynch was in no position to answer.

  It behooved me to dodge them every bit as much as my would-be murderers. It was out for me. Now was the time for it anyway. Kelly’s friends would lie low until the police had cleared away. It was now or never, while the police cars were keeping them away.

  I rolled the chest of drawers aside, unlocked the door, and squinted out. The building was humming with sounds and voices. I went back for the gun, laid it flat against my stomach under my shirt, with my belt to hold it up, buttoned my coat over it and started down the hall. An old maid opened her door and gawked. “Wha—what was that down below just now?”

  “Backfiring in the street,” I said reassuringly, and she jumped in again.

  The elevator was just rising flush with the floor. I could see the light and I had an idea who was on it. I dove down the fireproof stairs next to it, which were screened by frosted-glass doors on each floor.

  When I got down to the sixth, there was a shadow parked just outside them, on the hall side. A shadow wearing a visored cap. There was no light on my side. The lower half of the doors was wood. I bent double, slithered past without blurring the upper glass half, and pussyfooted on down.

  The other four landings were unguarde
d as yet. The staircase came out in the rear of the lobby, behind a potted plant. The lobby was jammed, people in bathrobes and kimonos milling about, reporters barging in and out the two rickety phone booths the place boasted, plainclothesmen and a cop keeping a space in front of the desk clear.

  Over the desk, head hanging down on the outside, dangled the clerk, showing his baldspot like a target, with a purple-black sworl in the exact middle of it. Outside the door was another cop, visible from where I was. I took the final all-important step that carried me off the staircase into the crowd. Someone turned around and saw me. “What happened?” I asked, and kept moving.

  A press photographer was trying to wedge himself into one of the narrow coflfin-like booths ahead of two or three others; evidently he doubled as a reporter, newspaper budgets being what they are. He unlimbered the black apparatus that was impeding him, shoved it at me.

  “Hold this for me a sec,” he said, and turned to the phone and dropped his nickel in. I kept moving toward the door, strapped the camera around my own shoulder as I went and breezed out past the cop in a typical journalistic hurry.

  “Hey, you!” he said, then: “Okay; take one of me, why don’tcha?”

  “Bust the camera,” I kidded back. I unloaded it into an ashcan the minute I got around the comer, and kept going.

  I was all the way across town from the Columbia when the first streak of dawn showed. The gun and the packs of twenties were both weighing me down, and I was at the mercy of the first patrolman who didn’t like my shape. But this was no time of night to check in at a second hotel. The last train in or out had been at midnight and the next was at seven. I had never realized until now how tough it was getting out of a town at odd hours—especially when you were two guys, neither one of whom could afford to be recognized. I had no car. A long-distance ride in a taxi would have been a dead giveaway; the driver would only have come back and shot his mouth off. To start off on foot wasn’t the answer either. Every passing car whose headhghts flicked me stemming the highway would be a possible source of information against me later.