Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“I met Joe Alden six months ago. His wife was in ill health, so I moved in with them to look after her. Her first husband had left her well off, with slews of negotiable bonds. Alden had already helped himself to a few of them before I showed up, but now that I was there, he wanted to get rid of her altogether, so that we could get our hands on the rest. I told him he’d never get away with anything there, where everybody knew her; he’d have to take her somewhere else first. He went looking for a house, and when he’d found one that suited him, the place in Denby, he took me out to inspect it, without her, and palmed me off on the agent as his wife.

“We made all the arrangements, and when the day came to move, he went ahead with the moving van. I followed in the car with her after dark. That timed it so that we reached there late at night; there wasn’t a soul around any more to see her go in. And from then on, as far as anyone in Denby knew, there were only two of us living in the house, not three. We didn’t keep her locked up, but we put her in a bedroom at the back, where she couldn’t be seen from the road, and put up a fine-meshed screen on the window. She was bed-ridden a good part of the time, anyway, and that made it easier to keep her presence concealed.

“He started to make his preparations from the moment we moved in. He began building this low wall out in front, as an excuse to order the bricks and other materials that he needed for the real work later on. He ordered more from the contractor than he needed, of course.

“Finally it happened. She felt a little better one day, came downstairs, and started checking over her list of bonds. He’d persuaded her when they were first married not to entrust them to a bank; she had them in an ordinary strongbox. She found out some of them were already missing. He went in there to her, and I listened outside the door. She didn’t say very much, just: ‘I thought I had more of these thousand-dollar bonds.’ But that was enough to show us that she’d caught on. Then she got up very quietly and went out of the room without another word.

“Before we knew it, she was on the telephone in the hall — trying to get help, I suppose. She didn’t have a chance to utter a word; he was too quick for her. He jumped out after her and pulled it away from her. He was between her and the front door, and she turned and went back upstairs, still without a sound, not even a scream. Maybe she still did not realize she was in bodily danger, thought she could get her things on and get out of the house.

“He said to me, ‘Go outside and wait in front. Make sure there’s no one anywhere in sight, up and down the road or in the fields.’ I went out there, looked, raised my arm and dropped it, as a signal to him to go ahead. He went up the stairs after her.

“You couldn’t hear a thing from inside. Not even a scream, or a chair falling over. He must have done it very quietly. In a while he came down to the door again. He was breathing a little fast and his face was a little pale, that was all. He said, ‘It’s over. I smothered her with one of the bed pillows. She didn’t have much strength.’ Then he went in again and carried her body down to the basement. We kept her down there while he went to work on this other wall; as soon as it was up high enough, he put her behind it and finished it. He repainted the whole room so that one side wouldn’t look too new.

“Then, without a word of warning, the girl showed up the other night. Luckily, just that night Joe had stayed down at the hotel late having a few beers. He recognized her as she got off the bus and brought her out with him in the car. That did away with her having to ask her way of anyone. We stalled her for a few minutes by pretending her mother was fast asleep, until I had time to put a sedative in some tea I gave her to drink. After that it was easy to handle her; we put her down in the basement and kept her doped down there.

“Joe remembered, from one of her letters, that she’d said her husband had insured her, so that gave us our angle. The next day I faked a long letter to her and mailed it to the city, as if she’d never shown up here at all. Then when Bliss came up looking for her, I tried to dope him, too, to give us a chance to transport her back to his house during his absence, finish her off down there, and pin it on him. He spoiled that by passing the food up and walking out on us. The only thing left for us to do after that was for Joe to beat the bus in, plant her clothes ahead of time, and put a bee in the police’s bonnet. That was just to get Bliss out of the way, so the coast would be left clear to get her in down there.

“We called his house from just inside the city limits when we got down here with her tonight. No one answered, so it seemed to have worked. But we’d lost a lot of time on account of that blowout. I waited outside in the car, with her covered up on the floor, drugged. When Joe had the hole dug, he came out and took her in with him.

“We thought all the risk we had to run was down at this end. We were sure we were perfectly safe up at the other end; Joe had done such a bang-up job on that wall. I still can’t understand how you caught onto it so quick.”

“I’m an architect, that’s why,” Bliss said grimly. “There was something about that room that bothered me. It wasn’t on the square.”

Smiles was lying in bed when Bliss went back to his own house, and she was pretty again. When she opened her eyes and looked up at him, they were all crinkly and smiling just as they used to be.

“Honey,” she said, “it’s so good to have you near me. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never walk out on you again.”

“That’s right, you stay where you belong, with Ed,” he said soothingly, “and nothing like that’ll ever happen to you again.”

It was just beginning to grow dark when Lew Stahl went in to the Odeon picture theater where his roommate Tom Lee worked as an usher. It was exactly 6:15.

Lew Stahl was twenty-five, out of work, dead broke and dead honest. He’d never killed anyone. He’d never held a deadly weapon in his hand. He’d never even seen anyone lying dead. All he wanted to do was see a show, and he didn’t have the necessary thirty cents on him.

The man on door duty gave him a disapproving look while Lew was standing out there in the lobby waiting for Tom to slip him in free. Up and down, and up again the doorman walked like “You gotta nerve!” But Stahl stayed pat. What’s the use having a pal as an usher in a movie house if you can’t cadge an admission now and then?

Tom stuck his head through the doors and flagged him in. “Friend of mine, Duke,” he pacified the doorman.

“Are you liable to get called down for this?” Stahl asked as he followed him in.

Tom said, “It’s O.K. as long as the manager don’t see me. It’s between shows anyway; everyone’s home at supper. The place is so empty you could stalk deer up in the balcony. Come on up, you can smoke up there.”

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman’s head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. “Go back, go back!” she said. “This is no place for you!”

Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn’t eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that.