The Oxford Book of American Det (58 page)

I said to get rid of Sam: “Go inside and smack a couple of eggs together.” Boyne began in a galvanised-iron voice: “Jeff, what do you mean by doing anything like this to me? I’ve made a fool out of myself, thanks to you. Sending my men out right and left on wild-goose chases. Thank God, I didn’t put my foot in it any worse than I did, and have this guy picked up and brought in for questioning.”

“Oh, then you don’t think that’s necessary?” I suggested, drily.

The look he gave me took care of that. “I’m not alone in the department, you know.

There are men over me I’m accountable to for my actions. That looks great, don’t it, sending one of my fellows one-half-a-day’s train ride up into the sticks to some God-forsaken whistle-stop or other at departmental expense—“

“Then you located the trunk?”

“We traced it through the express agency,” he said flintily.

“And you opened it?”

“We did better than that. We got in touch with the various farmhouses in the immediate locality, and Mrs. Thorwald came down to the junction in a produce-truck from one of them and opened it for him herself, with her own keys!” Very few men have ever gotten a look from an old friend such as I got from him. At the door he said, stiff as a rifle barrel: “Just let’s forget all about it, shall we? That’s about the kindest thing either one of us can do for the other. You’re not yourself, and I’m out a little of my own pocket money, time and temper. Let’s let it go at that. If you want to telephone me in future I’ll be glad to give you my home number.” The door went
whopp!
behind him.

For about ten minutes after he stormed out my numbed mind was in a sort of straitjacket. Then it started to wriggle its way free. The hell with the police. I can’t prove it to them, maybe, but I can prove it to myself, one way or the other, once and for all. Either I’m wrong or I’m right. He’s got his armour on against them. But his back is naked and unprotected against me.

I called Sam in. “Whatever became of that spyglass we used to have, when we were bumming around on that cabin-cruiser that season?”

He found it some place downstairs and came in with it, blowing on it and rubbing it along his sleeve. I let it lie idle in my lap first. I took a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote six words on it:
What have you done with her?

I sealed it in an envelope and left the envelope blank. I said to Sam: “Now here’s what I want you to do, and I want you to be slick about it. You take this, go in that building 525, climb the stairs to the fourth-floor rear, and ease it under the door. You’re fast, at least you used to be. Let’s see if you’re fast enough to keep from being caught at it.

Then when you get safely down again, give the outside doorbell a little poke, to attract attention.”

His mouth started to open.

“And don’t ask me any questions, you understand? I’m not fooling.” He went, and I got the spyglass ready.

I got him in the right focus after a minute or two. A face leaped up, and I was really seeing him for the first time. Dark-haired, but unmistakable Scandinavian ancestry.

Looked like a sinewy customer, although he didn’t run to much bulk.

About five minutes went by. His head turned sharply, profilewards. That was the bell-poke, right there. The note must be in already.

He gave me the back of his head as he went back toward the flat-door. The lens could follow him all the way to the rear, where my unaided eyes hadn’t been able to before.

He opened the door first, missed seeing it, looked out on a level. He closed it. Then he dipped, straightened up. He had it. I could see him turning it this way and that.

He shifted in, away from the door, nearer the window. He thought danger lay near the door, safety away from it. He didn’t know it was the other way around, the deeper into his own rooms he retreated the greater the danger.

He’d torn it open, he was reading it. God, how I watched his expression. My eyes clung to it like leeches. There was a sudden widening, a pulling—the whole skin of his face seemed to stretch back behind the ears, narrowing his eyes to Mongoloids. Shock.

Panic. His hand pushed out and found the wall, and he braced himself with it. Then he went back toward the door again slowly. I could see him creeping up on it, stalking it as though it were something alive. He opened it so slenderly you couldn’t see it at all, peered fearfully through the crack. Then he closed it, and he came back, zigzag, off balance from sheer reflex dismay. He toppled into a chair and snatched up a drink. Out of the bottle neck itself this time. And even while he was holding it to his lips, his head was turned looking over his shoulder at the door that had suddenly thrown his secret in his face.

I put the glass down.

Guilty! Guilty as all hell, and the police be damned!

My hand started toward the phone, came back again. What was the use? They wouldn’t listen now any more than they had before. “You should have seen his face, etc.” And I could hear Boyne’s answer: “Anyone gets a jolt from an anonymous letter, true or false. You would yourself.” They had a real live Mrs. Thorwald to show me—

or thought they had. I’d have to show them the dead one, to prove that they both weren’t one and the same. I, from my window, had to show them a body.

Well, he’d have to show me first.

It took hours before I got it. I kept pegging away at it, pegging away at it, while the afternoon wore away. Meanwhile he was pacing back and forth there like a caged panther. Two minds with but one thought, turned inside-out in my case. How to keep it hidden, how to see that it wasn’t kept hidden.

I was afraid he might try to light out, but if he intended doing that he was going to wait until after dark, apparently, so I had a little time yet. Possibly he didn’t want to himself, unless he was driven to it—still felt that it was more dangerous than to stay.

The customary sights and sounds around me went on unnoticed, while the main stream of my thoughts pounded like a torrent against that one obstacle stubbornly damming them up: how to get him to give the location away to me, so that I could give it away in turn to the police.

I was dimly conscious, I remember, of the landlord or somebody bringing in a prospective tenant to look at the sixth-floor apartment, the one that had already been finished. This was two over Thorwald’s; they were still at work on the in-between one.

At one point an odd little bit of synchronisation, completely accidental of course, cropped up. Landlord and tenant both happened to be near the living room windows on the sixth at the same moment that Thorwald was near those on the fourth. Both parties moved onward simultaneously into the kitchen from there, and, passing the blind spot of the wall, appeared next at the kitchen windows. It was uncanny, they were almost like precision-strollers or puppets manipulated on one and the same string.

It probably wouldn’t have happened again just like that in another fifty years.

Immediately afterwards they digressed, never to repeat themselves like that again.

The thing was, something about it had disturbed me. There had been some slight flaw or hitch to mar its smoothness. I tried for a moment or two to figure out what it had been, and couldn’t. The landlord and tenant had gone now, and only Thorwald was in sight. My unaided memory wasn’t enough to recapture it for me. My eyesight might have if it had been repeated, but it wasn’t.

It sank into my subconscious, to ferment there like yeast, while I went back to the main problem at hand.

I got it finally. It was well after dark, but I finally hit on a way. It mightn’t work, it was cumbersome and roundabout, but it was the only way I could think of. An alarmed turn of the head, a quick precautionary step in one certain direction, was all I needed.

And to get this brief, flickering, transitory give-away, I needed two phone calls and an absence of about half an hour on his part between them.

I leafed a directory by matchlight until I’d found what I wanted:
Thorwald, Lars. 525

Bndct... Swansea 5-2114.

I blew out the match, picked up the phone in the dark. It was like television. I could see to the other end of my call, only not along the wire but by a direct channel of vision from window to window.

He said “Hullo?” gruffly.

I thought: How strange this is. I’ve been accusing him of murder for three days straight, and only now I’m hearing his voice for the first time.

I didn’t try to disguise my own voice. After all, he’d never see me and I’d never see him. I said: “You got my note?”

He said guardedly: “Who is this?”

“Just somebody who happens to know.”

He said craftily: “Know what?”

“Know what you know. You and I, we’re the only ones.” He controlled himself well. I didn’t hear a sound. But he didn’t know he was open another way too. I had the glass balanced there at proper height on two large books on the sill. Through the window I saw him pull open the collar of his shirt as though its stricture was intolerable. Then he backed his hand over his eyes like you do when there’s a light blinding you.

His voice came back firmly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Business, that’s what I’m talking about. It should be worth something to me, shouldn’t it? To keep it from going any further.” I wanted to keep him from catching on that it was the windows. I still needed them, I needed them now more than ever.

“You weren’t very careful about your door the other night. Or maybe the draft swung it open a little.”

That hit him where he lived. Even the stomach-heave reached me over the wire. “You didn’t see anything. There wasn’t anything to see.”

“That’s up to you. Why should I go to the police?” I coughed a little. “If it would pay me not to.”

“Oh,” he said. And there was relief of a sort in it. “D’you want to—see me? Is that it?”

“That would be the best way, wouldn’t it? How much can you bring with you for now?”

“I’ve only got about seventy dollars around here.”

“All right, then we can arrange the rest for later. Do you know where Lakeside Park is? I’m near there now. Suppose we make it there.” That was about thirty minutes away. Fifteen there and fifteen back. “There’s a little pavilion as you go in.”

“How many of you are there?” he asked cautiously.

“Just me. It pays to keep things to yourself. That way you don’t have to divvy up.” He seemed to like that too. “I’ll take a run out,” he said, “just to see what it’s all about.”

I watched him more closely than ever, after he’d hung up. He flitted straight through to the end room, the bedroom, that he didn’t go near any more. He disappeared into a clothes-closet in there, stayed a minute, came out again. He must have taken something out of a hidden cranny or niche in there that even the dicks had missed. I could tell by the piston-like motion of his hand, just before it disappeared inside his coat, what it was. A gun.

It’s a good thing, I thought, I’m not out there in Lakeside Park waiting for my seventy dollars.

The place blacked and he was on his way.

I called Sam in. “I want you to do something for me that’s a little risky. In fact, damn risky. You might break a leg, or you might get shot, or you might even get pinched.

We’ve been together ten years, and I wouldn’t ask you anything like that if I could do it myself. But I can’t, and it’s got to be done.” Then I told him. “Go out the back way, cross the back yard fences, and see if you can get into that fourth-floor flat up the fire escape. He’s left one of the windows down a little from the top.”

“What do you want me to look for?”

“Nothing.” The police had been there already, so what was the good of that? “There are three rooms over there. I want you to disturb everything just a little bit, in all three, to show someone’s been in there. Turn up the edge of each rug a little, shift every chair and table around a little, leave the closet doors standing out. Don’t pass up a thing. Here, keep your eyes on this.” I took off my own wrist watch, strapped it on him. “You’ve got twenty-five minutes, starting from now. If you stay within those twenty-five minutes, nothing will happen to you. When you see they’re up, don’t wait any longer, get out and get out fast.”

“Climb back down?”

“No.” He wouldn’t remember, in his excitement, if he’d left the windows up or not.

And I didn’t want him to connect danger with the back of his place, but with the front.

I wanted to keep my own window out of it. “Latch the window down tight, let yourself out the door, and beat it out of the building the front way, for your life!”

“I’m just an easy mark for you,” he said ruefully, but he went.

He came out through our own basement door below me, and scrambled over the fences. If anyone had challenged him from one of the surrounding windows, I was going to backstop for him, explain I’d sent him down to look for something. But no one did. He made it pretty good for anyone his age. He isn’t so young any more. Even the fire escape backing the flat, which was drawn up short, he managed to contact by standing up on something. He got in, lit the light, looked over at me. I motioned him to go ahead, not weaken.

I watched him at it. There wasn’t any way I could protect him, now that he was in there. Even Thorwald would be within his rights in shooting him down—this was break and entry. I had to stay in back behind the scenes, like I had been all along. I couldn’t get out in front of him as a lookout and shield him. Even the dicks had had a lookout posted.

He must have been tense, doing it. I was twice as tense, watching him do it. The twenty-five minutes took fifty to go by. Finally he came over to the window, latched it fast. The lights went, and he was out. He’d made it. I blew out a bellyful of breath that was twenty-five minutes old.

I heard him keying the street door, and when he came up I said warningly: “Leave the light out in here. Go and build yourself a great big two-story whisky punch; you’re as close to white as you’ll ever be.”

Thorwald came back twenty-nine minutes after he’d left for Lakeside Park. A pretty slim margin to hang a man’s life on. So now for the finale of the long-winded business, and here was hoping. I got my second phone call in before he had time to notice anything amiss. It was tricky timing but I’d been sitting there with the receiver ready in my hand, dialling the number over and over, then killing it each time. He came in on the 2 of 5-2114, and I saved that much time. The ring started before his hand came away from the light switch.