Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“Help me carry him back to the restroom,” Tom said under his breath, and picked him up by the shoulders. Lew took him by the legs, and they stumbled back up the dark aisle with the corpse.

The woman who had watched all this was feverishly gathering up innumerable belongings, with a determination that almost approached hysteria, as if about to depart forthwith on a mission of vital importance.

Lew and Tom didn’t really see it until they got him in the restroom and stretched him out on a divan up against the wall — the knife-hilt jammed into his back. It didn’t stick out much, was in at an angle, nearly flat up against him. Sidewise from right to left, but evidently deep enough to touch the heart; they could tell by looking at him he was gone.

Tom babbled, “I’ll get the manager! Stay here with him a second. Don’t let anyone in!” He grabbed up a “No Admittance” sign on his way out, slapped it over the outside doorknob, then beat it.

Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. “So that’s what it’s like!” he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it. The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.

He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn’t afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions.

Next he went through his pockets, thinking he’d be helping to identify him.

The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true anymore, Lew thought, mystified; he’d left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he’d paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life — death — was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt.

The door flew open, and Tom bolted in again, still by himself and panting as though he’d run all the way up from the floor below. His face looked white, too.

“C’mere!” he said in a funny, jerky way. “Get outside, hurry up!”

Before Lew knew what it was all about, they were both outside, and Tom had propelled him all the way across the dimly lighted lounge to the other side of the house, where there was another branch of the staircase going down. His grip on Lew’s arm was as if something were skewered through the middle of it.

“What’s the idea?” Lew managed to get out.

Tom jerked his head backward. “You didn’t really do that, did you? To that guy.”

Lew nearly dropped through the floor. His answer was just a welter of words.

Tom telescoped it into “No,” rushed on breathlessly, “Well, then all the more reason for you to get out of here quick! Come on down on this side, before they get up here! I’ll tell you about it down below.”

Half-way down, on the landing, Tom stopped a second time, motioned Lew to listen. Outside in the street some place the faint, very wail of a patrol-car siren sounded, rushed to a crescendo as it drew nearer, then stopped abruptly, right in front of the theater itself.

“Get that? Here they are now!” Tom said ominously, and rushed Lew down the remaining half-light, around a turn to the back, and through a door stenciled “Employees Only.”

A flight of steps led down to a sub-basement. He pushed Lew ahead of him the rest of the way down, but Tom stayed where he was. He pitched something that flashed, and Lew caught it adroitly before he even knew what it was. A key.

“Open twelve, and switch to my blue suit,” Tom said. “Leave that gray of yours in the locker.”

Lew took a step back toward him, swung his arm back. “I haven’t done anything! What’s the matter with you? You trying to get me in a jam?”

“You’re in one already, I’m trying to get you out of it!” Tom snapped. “There’s a dame out there hanging onto the manager’s neck with both arms, swears she saw you do it. Hallucinations, you know the kind! Says he started falling asleep on you, and you gave him a shove, one word led to another, then you knifed him. Robbed him, too. She’s just hysterical enough to believe what she’s saying herself.”

Lew’s knees gave a dip. “But holy smoke! Can’t you tell ’em I was the first one told you about it myself? I even helped you carry him back to the rest-room! Does that look like I—”

“It took me long enough to get this job,” Tom said sourly. “If the manager finds out I passed you in free — what with this giving his house a bad name and all — I can kiss my job good-by! Think of my end of it, too. Why do they have to know anything about you? You didn’t do it, so all right. Then why be a chump and spend the night in a station-house basement? By tomorrow they’ll probably have the right guy and it’ll be all over with.”

Lew thought of that dollar he had in his pocket. If he went back and let them question him, they’d want to know why he hadn’t paid his way in, if he had a buck on him. That would tell them where the buck came from. He hated to pony up that buck now that he had it. And he remembered how he’d tampered with the knife-hilt, and vaguely knew there was something called fingerprints by which they had a way of telling who had handled it. And then the thought of bucking that woman — from what he remembered of the look on her face — took more nerve than he had. Tom was right, why not light out and steer clear of the whole mess, as long as he had the chance? And finally this argument presented itself: If they once got hold of him and believed he’d done it, that might satisfy them, they mightn’t even try to look any further, and then where would he be? A clear conscience doesn’t always make for courage, sometimes it’s just the other way around. The mystic words “circumstantial evidence” danced in front of his eyes, paralyzing him.

“Peel!” Tom said. “The show breaks in another couple minutes. When you hear the bugles bringing on the newsreel, slip out of here and mingle with the rest of them going out. She’s tagged you wearing a gray suit, so it ought to be easy enough to make it in my blue. They won’t think of busting open the lockers to look. Wait for me at our place.” Then Tom ducked out and the passageway-door closed noiselessly after him.

Lew didn’t give himself time to think. He jumped into the blue suit as Tom had told him to, put on his hat and bent the brim down over his eyes with fingers that were shaking like ribbons in a breeze. He was afraid any minute that someone, one of the other ushers, would walk in and catch him. What was he going to say he was doing in there?

He banged the locker closed on his own clothes, just as a muffled ta-da came from the screen outside. In another minute there were feet shuffling by outside the door and the hum of subdued voices. He edged the door open, and pressed it shut behind him with his elbow. The few movie goers who were leaving were all around him, and he let them carry him along with them. They didn’t seem to be aware, down below here, of what had happened up above so short a time ago. Lew didn’t hear any mention of it.

It was like running the gauntlet. There were two sets of doors and a brightly lighted lobby in between. One of the detectives was standing beside the doorman at the first set of doors. The watchful way he scanned all faces told Lew what he was. There was a second one outside the street doors. He kept looking so long at each person coming out — that told what he was.