Lisa Belknap - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 6, No. 12, December 1961

When the police finally admitted that it was a perfect crime, my syndicate decided to wrap up the story by doing a Sunday feature on perfect crimes, including this one. My editor called me in and handed me the assignment to illustrate it.

“Why me?” I asked. “I’m over my ears in work right now.”

“You lived in the same apartment building as the Berringers, didn’t you?” he asked. “You must have seen both him and his wife around the place.”

“Sure. Passed them in the hall a few times. Always nodded. We’re real polite people in Greenwich Village. But I never met them socially.”

“You never met the characters in the other perfect crimes socially either,” he said. “So that makes you eligible. Now, the layout I had in mind...”

That’s how editors think. Of course, there was no point in my telling him that even though I had never met the Berringers socially, I knew quite a bit about both Sam and his wife, Elise. Knowing about them was due to an acoustical freak in the construction of the reconverted apartment. It was one of those old buildings that had been ripped apart and modernized, and when it was, something happened to the acoustics in the place. You probably know about the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and how the acoustics are so perfect you can hear a pin drop way off in the distance? Well, by some construction quirk, the acoustics in my apartment worked the same way. Not through the whole flat. Just in one closet. From that closet, I could hear perfectly everything that went on in the apartment on the floor above me and diagonally across the hall. The Berringers lived there. In fact, they had moved from my flat to the bigger one above just before I rented my place.

I found out about the acoustics of that closet by accident. I was stowing away some of the real arty canvases I had painted before I turned commercial, when I heard the woman upstairs singing. Her husky voice came to me as clearly as if she was in that dark closet with me. It was a weird intimate sensation.

I did a lot of special assignment work, and worked home most of the time, and I found that if I put my drafting table in a certain spot and sat with my back to the open closet, I could hear every word that passed between the Berringers as clearly as if they were in the room with me. Call it eavesdropping, if you wish, but I was lonesome. Having voices in the room with me while I worked made the place feel less empty. Naturally, I never mentioned it to anyone or complained about it to the management.

By that acoustical freak, you might say that I knew the Berringers better than any one else in New York. They were from Texas, and they had made no friends, which was no surprise. Sam Berringer was a stinker.

He was one of those thin, blond, spoiled guys, with a surly mouth that made him look pretty instead of handsome. Apparently his family was rolling in oil and he was an only son. But his old man had kicked him out of the plush-lined nest so he could prove whether or not he was man enough to stand on his own two feet, and eventually manage the family fortune. Sam met the challenge by marrying Elise and letting her support him. Somewhere along the line, he also conceived the idea that he was a poet, and that someday, when inspiration knocked at his door, he would write a great epic.

All this came out little by little, when Sam had too much bourbon, or just naturally felt sorry for himself, and raved and ranted about his cruel, cruel fate.

Elise was as uncomplaining and quiet as he was whining and noisy. She was a beautiful creature, with large, luminous, dark eyes, and a pale, ethereal complexion. I could see how a “poet” would go for her, and think of her in terms of “cool zephyrs”, “diaphanous gossamer”, and junk like that. For all her seeming coolness, there was something about her that suggested deep-smouldering embers; embers that would blaze to white fire if the right breeze — meaning, the right person — caressed them. I think what first gave me that impression was the way she moved; with the sinuous grace of a cat.

Naturally, we nodded when we met in the hall, and a few times we exchanged such inane remarks as:

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Terribly. But I like the heat.”

No. That isn’t quite accurate. We did speak once. It was after I had been in my apartment about two weeks. She knocked at my door and when I opened it, she said, “I’m Mrs. Berringer from the floor above. We had this flat for a few months, and I thought I’d tell you that the defrost button on the refrigerator doesn’t work. The only way to defrost, is leave the door open a bit, and keep emptying the drip tray.”

It was a lame excuse for knocking at my door, but when I asked her to come in, she refused. Yet, before she left, her eyes passed quickly over the room and I noticed them flicker when she saw the open closet door behind my drafting table. In spite of the sketches lying around, she didn’t even make the usual comment, “Oh, I see you’re an artist.” As if she didn’t care, or, as if she already knew. She just glanced around the room and walked out. But that flicker of her eyes was unmistakable. She knew the secret of that closet.

I became positive of it as I listened to the conversations above me in the evenings that followed. She was no longer talking only to Sam. Her voice would change just a trifle and she would be talking to me, drawing Sam out for my benefit. It was then that I found out about Sam and his wealthy parents. It was then that I found that since he didn’t have his father to support him and his mother to coddle him, he had married Elise to do those things for him.

It burned me up that a girl like her should be willing to stick to a pale worm like Sam and support him while he sat around looking at ball games on TV, drinking bourbon and waiting for inspiration. I had the feeling that Elise was trying to tell me the reason why she stuck to him through the choice of words in her conversation. A few times I thought I had it, but I couldn’t be certain.

“You’ll write your epic,” she said one night. “I know you will. You’re the greatest living poet. You’ll write it, and then you’ll be a success and we’ll both be able to go back to your home.”

“How can I work, being cooped up in this lousy dump?” he accused her as if it wasn’t she who was paying the rent. “I had servants all my life... a big house... comfort... trees outside my window. Trees... That’s it! That’s what I need; trees. We could have trees if we could get a house in Westchester. Isn’t it time they gave you a promotion at the bank?”

“I’m a secretary,” she said. “Not an executive.”

“If there’s no future at the bank, why don’t you find something else? You’re capable of bigger things.”

“I’ll try, dear,” she said lightly. Then her voice took that odd tone she used when she was talking also to me. “Even you might be surprised at the things I’m capable of.”

She came in a few nights later all excited.

“I’ve been offered a job as an assistant buyer with a department store,” she told him. “It’ll mean some travel, but you could manage alone and...”

“No!” he shouted. “I know all about buyers and salesmen on the road. Drinking and carousing around and raising hell, and...”

“I don’t drink and I don’t carouse,” she said and there was such repressed white fire in her voice that I put down my pencil and pushed my stool back nearer to the closet. “Sometimes I wish I did. Believe me, if I found the right man...”

I heard him laugh uncertainly, frightened by her anger.

“Now you’re talking silly,” he said. “You’re not the type.”

Brother! How little you know! I wanted to say. You just give me a week with your beautiful, smouldering Elise ...