The Oxford Book of American Det (59 page)

This was the one that was going to tell the story.

“You were supposed to bring money, not a gun; that’s why I didn’t show up.” I saw the jolt that threw into him. The window still had to stay out of it. “I saw you tap the inside of your coat, where you had it, as you came out on the street.” Maybe he hadn’t, but he wouldn’t remember by now whether he had or not. You usually do when you’re packing a gun and aren’t a habitual carrier.

“Too bad you had your trip out and back for nothing. I didn’t waste my time while you were gone, though. I know more now than I knew before.” This was the important part. I had the glass up and I was practically fluoroscoping him. “I’ve found out where—it is. You know what I mean. I know now where you’ve got—it. I was there while you were out.”

Not a word. Just quick breathing.

“Don’t you believe me? Look around. Put the receiver down and take a look for yourself. I found it.”

He put it down, moved as far as the living room entrance, and touched off the lights.

He just looked around him once, in a sweeping, all-embracing stare, that didn’t come to a head on any one fixed point, didn’t centre at all.

He was smiling grimly when he came back to the phone. All he said, softly and with malignant satisfaction, was: “You’re a liar.”

Then I saw him lay the receiver down and take his hand off it. I hung up at my end.

The test had failed. And yet it hadn’t. He hadn’t given the location away as I’d hoped he would. And yet that “You’re a liar” was a tacit admission that it was there to be found, somewhere around him, somewhere on those premises. In such a good place that he didn’t have to worry about it, didn’t even have to look to make sure.

So there was a kind of sterile victory in my defeat. But it wasn’t worth a damn to me.

He was standing there with his back to me, and I couldn’t see what he was doing. I knew the phone was somewhere in front of him, but I thought he was just standing there pensive behind it. His head was slightly lowered, that was all. I’d hung up at my end. I didn’t even see his elbow move. And if his index finger did, I couldn’t see it.

He stood like that a moment or two, then finally he moved aside. The lights went out over there; I lost him. He was careful not even to strike matches, like he sometimes did in the dark.

My mind no longer distracted by having him to look at, I turned to trying to recapture something else—that troublesome little hitch in synchronisation that had occurred this afternoon, when the renting agent and he both moved simultaneously from one window to the next. The closest I could get was this: it was like when you’re looking at someone through a pane of imperfect glass, and a flaw in the glass distorts the symmetry of the reflected image for a second, until it has gone on past that point. Yet that wouldn’t do, that was not it. The windows had been open and there had been no glass between. And I hadn’t been using the lens at the time.

My phone rang. Boyne, I supposed. It wouldn’t be anyone else at this hour. Maybe, after reflecting on the way he’d jumped all over me—I said “Hello” unguardedly, in my own normal voice.

There wasn’t any answer.

I said: “Hello? Hello? Hello?” I kept giving away samples of my voice.

There wasn’t a sound from first to last.

I hung up finally. It was still dark over there, I noticed.

Sam looked in to check out. He was a bit thick-tongued from his restorative drink. He said something about “Awri’ if I go now?” I half heard him. I was trying to figure out another way of trapping him over there into giving away the right spot. I motioned my consent absently.

He went a little unsteadily down the stairs to the ground floor and after a delaying moment or two I heard the street door close after him. Poor Sam, he wasn’t much used to liquor.

I was left alone in the house, one chair the limit of my freedom of movement.

Suddenly a light went on over there again, just momentarily, to go right out again afterwards. He must have needed it for something, to locate something that he had already been looking for and found he wasn’t able to put his hands on readily without it. He found it, whatever it was, almost immediately, and moved back at once to put the lights out again. As he turned to do so, I saw him give a glance out the window.

He didn’t come to the window to do it, he just shot it out in passing.

Something about it struck me as different from any of the others I’d seen him give in all the time I’d been watching him. If you can qualify such an elusive thing as a glance, I would have termed it a glance with a purpose. It was certainly anything but vacant or random, it had a bright spark of fixity in it. It wasn’t one of those precautionary sweeps I’d seen him give, either. It hadn’t started over on the other side and worked its way around to my side, the right. It had hit dead-centre at my bay window, for just a split second while it lasted, and then was gone again. And the lights were gone, and he was gone.

Sometimes your senses take things in without your mind translating them into their proper meaning. My eyes saw that look. My mind refused to smelter it properly. ‘It was meaningless, ‘ I thought. ‘An unintentional bull’s-eye, that just happened to hit square over here, as he went toward the lights on his way out.’

Delayed action. A wordless ring of the phone. To test a voice? A period of bated darkness following that, in which two could have played at the same game—stalking one another’s window-squares, unseen. A last-moment flicker of the lights, that was bad strategy but unavoidable. A parting glance, radioactive with malignant intention.

All these things sank in without fusing. My eyes did their job, it was my mind that didn’t—or at least took its time about it.

Seconds went by in packages of sixty. It was very still around the familiar quadrangle formed by the back of the houses. Sort of a breathless stillness. And then a sound came into it, starting up from nowhere, nothing. The unmistakable, spaced clicking a cricket makes in the silence of the night. I thought of Sam’s superstition about them, that he claimed had never failed to fulfil itself yet. If that was the case, it looked bad for somebody in one of these slumbering houses around here—

Sam had been gone only about ten minutes. And now he was back again, he must have forgotten something. That drink was responsible. Maybe his hat, or maybe even the key to his own quarters uptown. He knew I couldn’t come down and let him in, and he was trying to be quiet about it, thinking perhaps I’d dozed off. All I could hear was this faint jiggling down at the lock of the front door. It was one of those old-fashioned stoop houses, with an outer pair of storm doors that were allowed to swing free all night, and then a small vestibule, and then the inner door, worked by a simple iron key.

The liquor had made his hand a little unreliable, although he’d had this difficulty once or twice before, even without it. A match would have helped him find the keyhole quicker, but then, Sam doesn’t smoke. I knew he wasn’t likely to have one on him.

The sound had stopped now. He must have given up, gone away again, decided to let whatever it was go until tomorrow. He hadn’t gotten in, because I knew his noisy way of letting doors coast shut by themselves too well, and there hadn’t been any sound of that sort, that loose slap he always made.

Then suddenly it exploded. Why at this particular moment, I don’t know. That was some mystery of the inner workings of my own mind. It flashed like waiting gunpowder which a spark has finally reached along a slow train. Drove all thoughts of Sam, and the front door, and this and that completely out of my head. It had been waiting there since mid-afternoon today, and only now—More of that delayed action.

Damn that delayed action.

The renting agent and Thorwald had both started even from the living room window.

An intervening gap of blind wall, and both had reappeared at the kitchen window, still one above the other. But some sort of a hitch or flaw or jump had taken place, right there, that bothered me. The eye is a reliable surveyor. There wasn’t anything the matter with their timing, it was with their parallel-ness, or whatever the word is. The hitch had been vertical, not horizontal. There had been an upward “jump.” Now I had it, now I knew. And it couldn’t wait. It was too good. They wanted a body? Now I had one for them.

Sore or not, Boyne would have to listen to me now. I didn’t waste any time, I dialled his precinct-house then and there in the dark, working the slots in my lap by memory alone. They didn’t make much noise going around, just a light click. Not even as distinct as that cricket out there—

“He went home long ago,” the desk sergeant said.

This couldn’t wait. “All right, give me his home phone number.” He took a minute, came back again. “Trafalgar,” he said. Then nothing more.

“Well? Trafalgar what?” Not a sound.

“Hello? Hello?” I tapped it. “Operator, I’ve been cut off. Give me that party again.” I couldn’t get her either.

I hadn’t been cut off. My wire had been cut. That had been too sudden, right in the middle of—And to be cut like that it would have to be done somewhere right here inside the house with me. Outside it went underground.

Delayed action. This time final, fatal, altogether too late. A voiceless ring of the phone.

A direction-finder of a look from over there. ‘Sam’ seemingly trying to get back in a while ago.

Surely, death was somewhere inside the house here with me. And I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get up out of this chair. Even if I had gotten through to Boyne just now, that would have been too late. There wasn’t time enough now for one of those camera-finishes in this. I could have shouted out the window to that gallery of sleeping rear-window neighbours around me, I supposed. It would have brought them to the windows. It couldn’t have brought them over here in time. By the time they had even figured which particular house it was coming from, it would stop again, be over with. I didn’t open my mouth. Not because I was brave, but because it was so obviously useless.

He’d be up in a minute. He must be on the stairs now, although I couldn’t hear him.

Not even a creak. A creak would have been a relief, would have placed him. This was like being shut up in the dark with the silence of a gliding, coiling cobra somewhere around you.

There wasn’t a weapon in the place with me. There were books there on the wall, in the dark, within reach. Me, who never read. The former owner’s books. There was a bust of Rousseau or Montesquieu, I’d never been able to decide which, one of those gents with flowing manes, topping them. It was a monstrosity, bisque clay, but it too dated from before my occupancy.

I arched my middle upward from the chair seat and clawed desperately up at it. Twice my fingertips slipped off it, then at the third raking I got it to teeter, and the fourth brought it down into my lap, pushing me down into the chair. There was a steamer rug under me. I didn’t need it around me in this weather, I’d been using it to soften the seat of the chair. I tugged it out from under and mantled it around me like an Indian brave’s blanket. Then I squirmed far down in the chair, let my head and one shoulder dangle out over the arm, on the side next to the wall. I hoisted the bust to my other, upward shoulder, balanced it there precariously for a second head, blanket tucked around its ears. From the back, in the dark, it would look—I hoped—

I proceeded to breathe adenoidally, like someone in heavy upright sleep. It wasn’t hard. My own breath was coming nearly that laboured anyway, from tension.

He was good with knobs and hinges and things. I never heard the door open, and this one, unlike the one downstairs, was right behind me. A little eddy of air puffed through the dark at me. I could feel it because my scalp, the real one, was all wet at the roots of the hair right then.

If it was going to be a knife or head-blow, the dodge might give me a second chance, that was the most I could hope for, I knew. My arms and shoulders are hefty. I’d bring him down on me in a bear-hug after the first slash or drive, and break his neck or collarbone against me. If it was going to be a gun, he’d get me anyway in the end. A difference of a few seconds. He had a gun, I knew, that he was going to use on me in the open, over at Lakeside Park. I was hoping that here, indoors, in order to make his own escape more practicable—

Time was up.

The flash of the shot lit up the room for a second, it was so dark. Or at least the corners of it, like flickering, weak lightning. The bust bounced on my shoulder and disintegrated into chunks.

I thought he was jumping up and down on the floor for a minute with frustrated rage.

Then when I saw him dart by me and lean over the window sill to look for a way out, the sound transferred itself rearwards and downwards, became a pummelling with hoof and hip at the street door. The camera-finish after all. But he still could have killed me five times.

I flung my body down into the narrow crevice between chair arm and wall, but my legs were still up, and so was my head and that one shoulder.

He whirled, fired at me so close that it was like looking a sunrise in the face. I didn’t feel it, so—it hadn’t hit.

“You—“ I heard him grunt to himself. I think it was the last thing he said. The rest of his life was all action, not verbal.

He flung over the sill on one arm and dropped into the yard. Two-story drop. He made it because he missed the cement, landed on the sod-strip in the middle. I jacked myself up over the chair arm and flung myself bodily forward at the window, nearly hitting it chin first.

He went all right. When life depends on it, you go. He took the first fence, rolled over that belly wards. He went over the second like a cat, hands and feet pointed together in a spring. Then he was back in the rear yard of his own building. He got up on something, just about like Sam had—The rest was all footwork, with quick little corkscrew twists at each landing stage. Sam had latched his windows down when he was over there, but he’d reopened one of them for ventilation on his return. His whole life depended now on that casual, unthinking little act—

Second, third. He was up to his own windows. He’d made it. Something went wrong.