Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“But I’ve got to,” he kept telling himself over and over. “They’ve got to help me, not go after me. They can’t say I — did anything like that to Smiles! Maybe I can hit one of them that’s fair minded, will listen to me.”

Meanwhile he had remained in the crouched position of a track runner waiting for the signal to start. He picked himself up slowly and straightened to his full height behind the hedge. That took courage, alone, without moving a step farther. “Well, here goes,” he muttered, tightened his belt, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. It was a crawly sort of feeling. He knew, nine chances to one, his freedom of movement was over the minute he stepped out from behind this hedge and went over toward that inky tree shadow across the street that was just a little too lumpy in the middle. He didn’t give a rap about freedom of movement in itself, but his whole purpose, his one aim from now on, was to look for and find Smiles. He was afraid losing it would hamper him in that. She was his wife; he wanted to look for her himself. He didn’t want other guys to do it for him whether they were professionals or not.

He lighted the cigarette when halfway across the street, but the tree shadow didn’t move. The detective evidently didn’t know him by sight yet, was on the lookout for someone coming from the other direction on his way to the house.

Bliss stopped right in front of him and said, “Are you looking for me? I’m Ed Bliss and I live over there.”

The shadow up and down the tree trunk detached itself, became a man. “How’d you know anyone was looking for you?” It was a challenge, as though that were already an admission of guilt in itself.

Bliss said, “Come inside, will you? I want to talk to you.”

They crossed over once more. Bliss unlocked the door for him, with his own key this time, and put on the lights. They went into the living-room. It was already getting dusty from not being cleaned in several days.

He looked Bliss over good. Bliss looked him over just as good. He wanted a man in this, not a detective.

The detective spoke first, repeated what he’d asked him outside on the street. “How’d you know we’d be looking for you when that bus got in?”

“I didn’t. I just happened to take a lift down instead.”

“What’s become of your wife, Bliss?”

“I don’t know.”

“We think you do.”

“I wish you were right. But not in the way you mean.”

“Never mind what you wish. You know another good word for that? Remorse.”

The blood in Bliss’s face thinned a little. “Before you put me in the soup, just let me talk here quietly with you a few minutes. That’s all I ask.”

“When she walked out of here Tuesday night, what was she wearing?”

Bliss hesitated a minute. Not because he didn’t know — he’d already described her outfit to them when he reported her missing — but because he could sense a deeper import lurking behind the question.

The detective took the hesitancy for an attempt at evasion, went on: “Now, every man knows his wife’s clothes by heart. You paid for every last one of them; you know just what she owned. Just tell me what she had on.”

There was danger in it somewhere. “She had on a gray suit — jacket and skirt, you know. Then a pink silk shirtwaist. She threw her fur piece back at me, so that’s about all she went out in. A hat, of course. One of those crazy hats.”

“Baggage?”

“A black valise with tan binding. Oh, about the size of a typewriter case.”

“Sure of that?”

“Sure of that.”

The detective gave a kind of soundless whistle through his teeth.

“Whe-ew!” he said, and he looked at Bliss almost as if he felt sorry for him. “You’ve sure made it tough for yourself this time! I didn’t have to ask you that, because we know just as well as you what she had on.”

“How?”

“Because we found every last one of those articles you just mentioned in the furnace downstairs in this very house, less than twenty minutes ago. My partner’s gone down to headquarters with them. And a guy don’t do that to his wife’s clothes unless he’s done something to his wife, too. What’ve you done with her, Bliss?”

The other man wasn’t even in the room with him any more, so far as Bliss was concerned. A curtain of foggy horror had dropped down all around him. “My God!” he whispered hoarsely. “Something’s happened to her, somebody’s done something to her!” And he jumped up and ran out of the room so unexpectedly, so swiftly, that if his purpose had been to escape, he almost could have eluded the other man. Instead, he made for the cellar door and ran down the basement steps. The detective had shot to his feet after him, was at his heels by the time he got down to the bottom. Bliss turned on the light and looked at the furnace grate, yawning emptily open — as though that could tell him anything more.

He turned despairingly to the detective. “Was there any blood on them?”

“Should there have been?”

“Don’t! Have a heart,” Bliss begged in a choked voice, and shaded his eyes. “Who put them in there? Why’d they bring them back here? How’d they get in while I was out?”

“Quit that,” the headquarters man said dryly. “Suppose we get started. Our guys’ll be looking all over for you, and it’ll save them a lot of trouble.”

Every few steps on the way back up those basement stairs, Bliss would stop, as though he’d run down and needed winding up again. The detective would prod him forward, not roughly, just as a sort of reminder to keep going.

“Why’d they put them there ?” he asked. “Things that go in there are meant for fuel. That’s what you came back for, to finish burning them, isn’t it? Too late in the year to make a fire in the daytime without attracting attention.”

“Listen. We were only married six weeks.”

“What’s that supposed to prove? Do you think there haven’t been guys that got rid of their wives six days after they were married, or even six hours ?”

“But those are fiends — monsters. I couldn’t be one of them!”

And the pitiless answer was: “How do we know that? We can’t tell, from the outside, what you’re like on the inside. We’re not X-ray machines.”

They were up on the main floor again by now.

“Was she insured?” the detective questioned.

“Yes.”

“You tell everything, don’t you?”

“Because there’s nothing to hide. I didn’t just insure her, I insured us both. I took out twin policies, one on each of us. We were each other’s beneficiaries. She wanted it that way.”

“But you’re here and she’s not,” the detective pointed out remorselessly.

They passed the dining-room entrance. Maybe it was the dishes still left on the table from that night that got to him. She came before him again, with her smiling crinkly eyes. He could see her carrying in a plate covered with a napkin. “Sit down there, mister, and don’t look. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

That finished him. That was a blow below the belt. He said, “You gotta let me alone a minute.” And he slumped against the wall with his arm up over his face.

When he finally got over it, and it took some getting over, a sort of change had come over the detective. He said tonelessly, “Sit down a minute. Get your breath back and pull yourself together.” He didn’t sound like he meant that particularly, it was just an excuse.

He lighted a cigarette and then he threw the pack over at Bliss. Bliss let it slide off his thigh without bothering with it.

The detective said, “I’ve been a dick going on eight years now, and I never saw a guy who could fake a spell like you just had, and make it so convincing.” He paused, then went on: “The reason I’m saying this is, once you go in you stay in, after what we found here in the house tonight. And, then, you did come up to me outside of your own accord, but of course that could have been just self-preservation. So I’m listening, for just as long as it takes me to finish this cigarette. By the time I’m through, if you haven’t been able to tell me anything that changes the looks of things around, away we go.” And he took a puff and waited.