Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

Lew saw them both before he got up to them, through the clear glass of the inner doors. The lights were on their side, Lew was in the dark, with the show still going on in back of him. His courage froze, he wanted to stay in there where he was. But if he was going to get out at all, now was the time, with the majority of the crowd, not later on when he’d be more conspicuous.

One thing in his favor was the color of his suit. He saw the detectives stopping all the men in gray and motioning them aside; he counted six being sidetracked before he even got out into the lobby. They weren’t interfering with anyone else.

But that ticket-taker was a bigger risk than either of the plainclothes-men. So was the doorman. Before he’d gone in he’d been standing right under both their eyes a full five minutes waiting for Tom to come down. He’d gone in without paying, and that had burned the ticket-taker up. But going past them, Lew had to walk slow, as slowly as everyone else was walking, or he’d give himself away twice as quick. He couldn’t turn around now and go back any more, either; he was too close to the detectives and they’d notice the maneuver.

A clod-hopper in front of him came to his rescue just when he thought he was a goner. The clod-hopper stepped backward unexpectedly to take a look at something, and his whole hoof landed like a stone-cutter’s mallet across Lew’s toes. Lew’s face screwed up uncontrollably with pain, and before he straightened it out again, the deadly doorman’s gaze had swept harmlessly over it without recognition, and Lew was past him and all he could see was the back of Lew’s head.

Lew held his breath. Nothing happened. Right foot forward, left foot forward, right foot forward... The lobby seemed to go on for miles. Someone’s hand touched him, and the mercury went all the way down his spine to the bottom, but it was only a woman close behind him putting on her gloves.

After what seemed like an eternity of slow motion, he was flush with the street-doors at last. Only that second detective out there to buck now, and he didn’t worry him much. He drifted through with all the others, passed close enough to the detective to touch him, and he wasn’t even looking at Lew. His eyes were on the slap-slap of the doors as they kept swinging to and fro with each new egress.

Lew moved from under the revealing glare of the marquee lights into the sheltering darkness. He didn’t look back, and presently the hellish place was just a blob of light far behind him. Then it wasn’t even that any more.

He kept dabbing his face, and he felt limp in the legs for a long time afterwards. He’d made it, but whew! what an experience; he said to himself that he’d undergone all the emotions of a hunted criminal, without having committed a crime.

Tom and Lew had a cheap furnished room in a tenement about half an hour’s walk away. Lew walked there unhesitatingly now, in a straight line from the theater. As far as he could see, it was all over, there wasn’t anything to worry about now any more. He was out of the place, and that was all that mattered. They’d have the right guy in custody, maybe before the night was over, anyway by tomorrow at the latest.

He let himself into the front hallway with the key, climbed the stairs without meeting anyone, and closed the room door behind him. He snapped on the fly-blown bulb hanging from the ceiling, and sat down to wait for Tom.

Finally the clock rotated to 11 P.M. The last show broke at 11:30, and when Tom got here it would be about twelve.

About the time Tom should have been showing up, a newspaper delivery truck came rumbling by, distributing the midnight edition. Lew saw it stop by a stand down at the corner and dump out a bale of papers. On an impulse he got up and went down there to get one, wondering if it would have the story in it yet, and whether they’d caught the guy yet. He didn’t open it until he’d got back.

It hadn’t made a scare-head, but it had made a column on the front page. “Man stabbed in movie house; woman sees crime committed.” Lew got sort of a vicarious thrill out of it for a minute, until he read further along. They were still looking for a guy just his height and build, wearing a gray suit, who had bummed his way in free. The motive — probably caught by the victim in the act of picking his pocket while he slept. In panic, Lew doused the light.

From then on it was a case of standing watching from behind the drawn shade and standing listening behind the door, and wearing down the flooring in between the two places like a caged bear. He knew he was crazy to stay there, and yet he didn’t know where else to go. It would be even crazier, he thought, to roam around in the streets, he’d be sure to be picked up before morning. The sweat came out of every pore hot, and then froze cold. And yet never once did the idea of walking back there of his own accord, and saying to them, “Well, here I am; I didn’t do it,” occur to him. It looked too bad now, the way he’d changed clothes and run out. He cursed Tom for putting him up to it, and himself for losing his head and listening to him. It was too late now. There’s a finality about print, especially to a novice; because that paper said they were looking for him, it seemed to kill Lew’s last chance of clearing himself once and for all.

He didn’t see Tom coming, although he was glancing out through a corner of the window the whole time; Tom must have slunk along close to the building line below. There was a sudden scurry of quick steps on the stairs, and Tom was trying the door-knob like fury. Lew had locked it on the inside when he’d put the light out.

“Hurry up, lemme in!” Tom panted. And then when Lew had unlocked the door: “Leave that light out, you fool!”

“I thought you’d never get here!” Lew groaned. “What’d they do, give a midnight matinee?”

“Down at Headquarters, they did!” Tom said resentfully. “Hauled me down there and been holding me there ever since! I’m surprised they let me go when they did. I didn’t think they were gonna.” He threw the door open. “You gotta get out of here!”

“Where’m I gonna go?” Lew wailed. “You’re a fine louse of a friend!”

“Suppose a cop shows up here all of a sudden and finds you here, how’s that gonna make it look for me? How do I know I wasn’t followed coming back here? Maybe that’s why they let me go!”

Tom kept trying to shoulder Lew out in the hall, and Lew kept trying to hang onto the door-frame and stay in; in a minute more they would have been at it hot and heavy, but suddenly there was a pounding at the street-door three floors below. They both froze.

“I knew it!” Tom hissed. “Right at my heels!”

The pounding kept up. “Coming! Wait a minute, can’t you?” a woman’s voice said from the back, and bedroom-slippers went slapping across the oilcloth. Lew was out on the landing now of his own accord, scuttling around it like a mouse trying to find a hole.

Tom jerked his thumb at the stairs going up. “The roof!” he whispered. “Maybe you can get down through the house next door.” But Lew could see all he cared about was that he was out of the room.

Tom closed the door silently but definitely. The one below opened at the same instant, to the accompaniment of loud beefs from the landlady, that effectively covered the creaking of the stairs under Lew’s flying feet.

“The idea, getting people out of their beds at this hour! Don’t you tell me to pipe down, detective or no detective! This is a respectable hou—”

Lew was up past the top floor by that time. The last section was not inclined stairs any more but a vertical iron ladder, ending just under a flat, lead skylight, latched on the underside. He flicked the latch open, climbed up a rung further and lowered his head out of the way, with the thing pressing across his shoulders like Atlas supporting the world. He had to stay there like that till he got in out of the stair-well; he figured the cop would hear the thing creak and groan otherwise. It didn’t have hinges, had to be displaced bodily.