Dark Tunnel (16 page)

As I pushed the telephone to the back of the desk, I noticed the ink-stains on my fingers. Fingerprint ink. Perhaps the fingerprint man was still in the building.

I went down the hall to Alec’s office and looked in through the broken pane in the door. The fingerprint man was packing away his equipment in the black wooden case. I opened the door and he looked up.

“Did you find any fingerprints?” I asked.

“Nary a one, if I know what you mean. Plenty of the deceased—I took his prints at the morgue. Some of yours. A lot of old ones, but you can’t do anything with them.”

“Any on the telephone?”

“Not a one. Somebody must have wiped it clean, probably the deceased.”

“Probably.” I was tired of arguing. He shut up his case and reached for the lamp and I stepped into the hall. The light clicked out and he came out the door.

“Sticky,” he said.

“What’s sticky?”

“The pull-chain on the lamp. Some sort of crap on it.”

I heard quick steps on the west stairs and turned to see Haggerty come round the turning and trot up the last flight.

“Hello, professor. Are you finished, Sylvie?” he said. “Two bits you didn’t find anything.”

“That’s right,” Sylvie replied. “If that guy was murdered, he was murdered by a ghost and the ghost wore gloves.”

“He wasn’t murdered, Sylvie,” Haggerty said. “Was he, professor? The girl heard him jump, she was right there, and there wasn’t anybody else there. Why the hell he didn’t leave a suicide note and save us all this trouble—”

“Is the main thing in a murder case to save trouble?” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, are you still harping on that?” Haggerty spoke with real surprise which he exaggerated. “Better cut it, professor. Your boss doesn’t like it.”

“My boss?”

“I was talking to old man Galloway. He’s got a peeve on you for raising a rumpus about nothing.”

“Do I go home now, Sarge,” Sylvie asked.

“Why not? Go ahead home. I’ll stay here all night and argue with the professor about whether there’s a fourth dimension. A very interesting subject.”

“Good night,” Sylvie said and started down the stairs lugging his case. Haggerty stood showing his yellow teeth in a patronizing leer.

I wanted to tell him that he was acting pretty cocky for a dumb cop that didn’t know one of his most important body openings from an excavation in the earth. But I also wanted his co-operation and I let him leer.

“Look, Sergeant,” I said, “I’m not trying to set myself up as a detective and I’m ready to admit that you have all the apparent facts on your side. But I’m not satisfied that this was suicide, and I knew the dead man better than anyone else. If it looks like suicide, it means that Alec Judd was murdered by some very clever people.”

“You’re wrong.” There was a whining note in his voice that made him sound tired. “My God, professor, I said I’d leave Shakespeare to you.”

“If I’m wrong I’m a nuisance and damn fool,” I said. “But I think I’m right. Will you help me get some information?”

“What information?”

“Information on the movements of a woman who could have killed Alec Judd.”

“What makes you think so?”

“It’s a long story. But all I want to know is whether she had an alibi for the time of his death.”

“Where would her alibi be?”

“She’s registered at the Palace Hotel. It should be easy to find out if she was there at midnight.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ruth Esch. E-S-C-H.” I shifted my feet and the coins in my trousers pocket rattled. They clinked like thirty pieces of silver.

“Description?”

“Tall, red hair, green eyes, good features, thirtyish. Slight German accent—”

“You’re not one of these Germanophiles, are you?” Haggerty said, squinting up at me.

“Do you mean Germanophobe, German-hater? No, I’m not.”

“Galloway said something.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye as if he was playing with the notion of having an idea. “Who is this dame?”

“A German refugee who just came to this country. She used to be—a friend of mine.”

“Lovely circle of friends.” Suddenly he spoke in a loud voice with a rasp in it, like a man who has decided that there is no risk in getting tough and is overdoing it:

“Why should I check up on your floozies for you, professor? I’m no private dick. And you better drag your face out of other people’s business or you might get into bad trouble.”

I said: “So you’re nasty as well as stupid. I didn’t know you were as complex as all that.”

I left him standing in the hall and went down the west stairs to the basement and out the back door. I started home to get my car with anger tingling in my legs.

Crossing the dark campus, I saw one lighted face of the tower clock through the trees. 2:25. I felt late and old. The anger ran out of me like hot water and left my blood cold and sluggish. I thought of Ruth and my stomach felt bruised by disappointed hope. If Ruth had turned her coat, I could trust nobody alive. But I had to find out about her.

There was a movement in the shadow of a tree, and I saw green eyes burning at me like metallic fire. My breath stopped in my throat and I peered into the darkness for the green-eyed woman.

I found my voice and said, “Who’s that?”

A cat stalked out from under the tree and fawned against my leg. I stepped over it and walked on, restraining an impulse to kick it to death.

The back of my neck was still crawling when I got my sedan out of the apartment garage. The streets were deserted and I stepped hard on the accelerator as I circled the campus, because it helped to give me back a feeling of control over things. In less than five minutes I was parked around the corner from the Palace Hotel.

I got out and went around the corner and into the hotel. The lobby was dim and the brown leather armchairs sat in the corners like broad-shouldered, headless old men. But there was a bright light over the main desk and a young man with carefully parted fair hair sat behind it like a saint in a lighted embrasure or a dummy in a show-window. A bellhop leaning against the wall by the elevator doors stirred like a reptile at a touch of the sun when I came in the door.

He saw that I had no suitcase and went to sleep again against the wall.

When I walked up to the desk, the night-clerk got up and spread his hands wide on the top of it as if it was going to be his personal gift to me.

“What can we do for you, sir?” he fluted.

“Miss Ruth Esch is staying here, I believe. I’d like to speak to her.”

“It’s very late. Perhaps I could take a message?”

“This is important. Will you ring her room, please.”

He turned and looked at the key board and turned back to me. “I’m sorry, sir, she seems to have gone out. Now, let me see, I think she went out not long ago. Yes, not very long ago.

“Did she check out?”

“No, sir. She simply went out, perhaps for a walk. She seems quite a restless young lady.”

“I’ll wait,” I said.

“Very well, sir. But she left no word as to when she’d be back.”

“Thanks.”

I sat down in an armchair by a pillar where I could watch the door, and lit a cigarette. I usually smoke about two cigarettes an hour, but this was the first cigarette I had remembered to smoke since midnight. It tasted dirty and I pushed it into a jar of sand beside my chair.

There was a clang of metal behind me and I looked towards the elevator. A pair of brass doors parted in the middle and a man with a shabby purplish-brown suit, a red tie and a pink face stepped out of the lighted elevator, as if from a picture painted by a color-blind painter.

He saw me and sauntered across the carpet towards me and sat down in the chair at my elbow.

“Good evening,” I said.

“Good evening,” he said. “I guess it’s good morning. What a life.” He yawned and tapped his wide mouth with elephantine delicacy and stubby fingers. He took off his limp brown fedora and mopped his bald head with a purple silk handkerchief. He put it back in his pocket and arranged it carefully with one corner showing.

“Waiting for somebody?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s pretty late.”

“I was at a party.”

“Wish I was. I spend my life breaking up parties and there’s nothing I like better than a good rousing party with clean women and lively liquor. It goes against my grain always busting up parties. What a life.”

“Life is very long,” I said. “Are you the hotel detective?”

“That’s right. At your service and at the mercy of my feet. I can’t take credit for that one. That was on the wall in the office when I was a private dick in Detroit. Boy, them were the days. All the women I wanted and plenty of cash money on the side. Clean women, too. I could tear off a piece with the best of them before my heart went funny. It’s as funny as hell, y’know, sometimes it goes one-two-three-stop, one-two-three-stop.” He tapped on the arm of his chair to illustrate. I could see the veins on the back of his hand standing out like blue branches under the skin.

I waded into his stream of consciousness and said, “Maybe you can help me. As a matter of fact, the party’s still going on and I came over here to win a bet.”

“What kind of a bet?” He leaned towards me across the arms of the chairs and I could smell aniseed on his breath.

“It’s a crazy kind of bet,” I said, “but I stand to win twenty bucks if I can do what I’m supposed to. The idea is to trace the movements of one of the girls that was at the party. She was to come down here and register and then keep track of her own movements, the time of any telephone calls and so on, and then go back and hand in her report to the guy that’s running the game. I have to trace her movements and keep my own record and if it’s reasonably accurate I get a prize.”

“Twenty bucks, eh?” He took out a patent nail-clipper and clipped the thick cracked nail of his left thumb. Then he started on the fingers.

I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet and reached over and tucked it in behind the purple handkerchief. “Do you think you can help me?”

“I might. When did she register?”

“You can easily find out. It couldn’t have been much before eleven.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ruth Esch. She’s got red hair and—”

“Oh, the red-headed girl?” He looked at me quizzically out of protruding blue eyes.

“You saw her?”

“Yeah. Sure. You want to wait here?”

“Yes. When she came and when she left. Phone calls. Visitors. Those are the main things.”

“Especially visitors, eh?” he said, and shuffled off. I wondered what he meant.

He talked to the night-clerk first and then disappeared through a door behind the desk. I waited fifteen or twenty minutes. When he got back, I had chewed most of the skin from the inside of my upper lip.

He switched on the floor-lamp behind our chairs and sat down beside me with a small slip of paper covered with pencilings in his hand.

“Did you get it?” I said.

“Sure. Why not? Take this down if you want to.”

I took a pen and envelope out of my pocket and got ready to write on my knee.

“O.K.,” he said. “She registered at the hotel about eleven or a little after. Call it three minutes after. Around eleven twenty-five she got a phone call and a couple of minutes later she went out. Call it eleven-thirty. On the way out she told the desk-clerk she was just going out for a bite to eat and she asked him for the name of a good place to go. He told her the Porpoise down the street.

“She came back in about twenty minutes or so, but you can pin that down closer. She told the clerk when she went out at eleven-thirty that she was expecting a phone call around a quarter to twelve, and to hold it for her if she wasn’t back by then. It came all right at a quarter to twelve and the operator held it for her for about five-six minutes and she came back and took it in her room.”

“What time did she get back here?”

“Ten to twelve, close as I can figure.”

“Does the operator know who the call was from?”

“I asked her, just to be complete. She didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. Maybe a morphidite, eh?” He looked at me and winked and I smiled as cheerfully as I could.

“The word is hermaphrodite. The god Hermes and the goddess Aphrodite in one body blent.”

“Nice set-up, eh? You from the university?”

“That’s right. When did she go out again?”

“About three-quarters of an hour ago. Two-fifteen or two-twenty. Does that cover it?”

“Very nicely. You’re sure that this is straight?”

“As straight as I can bring it to you. I talked to the clerk and the operator and the bellhop.”

“Nice work.” I leaned forward to get up but he pushed his face towards me and said in an earnest whisper:

“Listen, friend, is this girl your wife?”

“No. Just a friend.”

“A girl-friend like? I mean you take her out quite a bit?”

“More or less,” I said. “Why?”

“Because I won’t take your money without telling you, boy. Mind you I’m not saying there’s no bet, I’m just saying you take it from me that that dame’s poison with a red label and you keep clear of her. She’s got the skull and crossbones on her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a dike, friend. I’ve seen a million of them and I know. She likes women better than men. Now go back to your party if there is any party and thanks for the easy money, friend.”

I said, “Good night,” in a weak voice and walked out of the hotel. The stars fell down and rattled at the bottom of the sky and the night put on shabby brown clothes.

I
WALKED DOWN THE
main street towards the Porpoise, which was a block from the hotel. Ruth Esch had an alibi all right, but I had to make sure that it was perfect before I could put her in the locked cupboard at the back of my mind and forget her for good. The blue porpoise sign over the entrance was lit, but the restaurant was closed for the night. I walked back to my car, feeling almost glad that I couldn’t lay myself open to another jolt. A dream that you’ve slept with for six years has remarkable staying power.

The only live things on the main street were the neon signs, shining like cold fire on the three o’clock pavements. But there was a White Tower lit up across from where my car was parked, and I crossed the street and went in. My solar plexus was still numb where the word
dike
had hit me, and I ordered coffee.