Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

Lew reached in his pocket as he took the stairs, brought out a fistful of the money and not the gun for once. At least a hundred’s worth came up in his paw. One of the bills escaped, fluttered down the steps behind him like a green leaf. What’s ten, or even twenty, when you’ve got sixty seconds to buy your life?

“In there!” One of the winded, surviving cops’ voices rang out clearly, penetrated the hall from the sidewalk. The screech of a prowl car chimed in.

He was holding the handful of green dough up in front of him, like the olive branch of the ancients, when the first of the three doors opened before him, second-floor front. A man with a curleycue mustache was blinking out as he raced at him.

“A hundred bucks!” Lew hissed. “They’re after me! Here, hundred bucks if you lemme get in your door!”

“Whassa mat’?” he wanted to know, startled wide awake.

“Cops! Hundred bucks!” The space between them had been used up, Lew’s whole body hit the door like a projectile. The man was holding onto it on the inside, so it wouldn’t give. The impact swung Lew around sideways, he clawed at it with one hand, shoved the bouquet of money into the man’s face with the other. “Two hundred bucks!”

“Go ‘way!” the man cried, tried to close Lew out. Lew had decided to shoot him out of the way if he couldn’t buy his way in.

A deep bass voice came rumbling up behind him. “Che cosa, Mario?”

“Two hundred bucks,” Lew strangled, reaching for the gun with his left hand.”

“Due cento dollari!” The door was torn away from him, opened wide. An enormous, mustached, garlicky Italian woman stood there. “Issa good? Issa rill?” Lew jammed them down her huge bosom as the quickest way of proving their authenticity. Maybe Mario Jr. had had a run-in with cops about breaking a window or swiping fruit from a pushcart; maybe it was just the poverty. She slapped one hand on her chest to hold the money there, grabbed Lew’s arm with the other.

“Si! Vene presto! ” and spat a warning “Silenzio! La porta! ” at her reluctant old man.

She pounded down the long inner hall, towing Lew after her. The door closed behind them as the stairway outside was started vibrating with ascending feet — flat feet.

The bedroom was pitch black. She let go of him, gave him a push sideways and down, and he went sprawling across an enormous room-filling bed. A cat snatched itself out of the way and jumped down. He hoisted his legs up after him, clawed, pulled a garlicky quilt up to his chin. He began to undress hectically under it, lying on his side. She snapped a light on and was standing there counting the money. “Falta cento —” she growled aggressively.

“You get the other hundred after they go ‘way.” He stuck his hand out under the cover, showed it to her. He took the gun out and showed her that too. “If you or your old man give me away—!”

Pounding had already begun at their door. Her husband was standing there by it, not making a sound. She shoved the money down under the same mattress Lew was on. He got rid of his coat, trousers and shoes, pitched them out on the other side of him, just as she snapped out the light once more. He kept the gun and money with him, under his body.

The next thing he knew, the whole bed structure quivered under him, wobbled, all but sank flat. She’d got in alongside of him! The clothes billowed like sails in a storm, subsided. She went, “Ssst!” like a steam radiator, and the sound carried out into the hall. Lew heard the man pick up his feet two or three times, plank them down again, right where he was standing, to simulate trudging toward the door. Then he opened it, and they were in. Lew closed his eyes, spaded one hand under him and kept it on the gun.

“Took you long enough!” a voice said at the end of the hall. “Anyone come in here?”

“Nome-body.”

“Well, we’ll take a look for ourselves! Give it the lights!”

The lining of Lew’s eyelids turned vermilion, but he kept them down. The mountain next to him stirred, gyrated. “Che cosa, Mario? ”

“Polizia, non capisco.”

Kids were waking up all over the place, in adjoining rooms, adding to the anvil chorus. It would have looked phony to go on sleeping any longer in that racket. Lew squirmed, stretched, blinked, yawned, popped his eyes in innocent surprise. There were two cops in the room, one of them standing still, looking at him, the other sticking his head into a closet.

Lew had black hair and was sallow from undernourishment, but he didn’t know a word of Italian.

“Who’s this guy?” the cop asked.

“Il mio fratello.” Her brother. The volume of noise she and Mario and the kids were making covered him.

The first cop went out. The second one came closer, pulled the corner of the covers off Lew. All he saw was a skinny torso in an undershirt. Lew’s outside shirt was rolled in a ball down by his feet. His thumb found and went into the hollow before the trigger underneath him. If he said “Get up outa there,” those would be the last words he ever said.

He said, “Three in a bed?” disgustedly. “Sure y’ain’t got your grandfather in there, too? These guineas!” He threw the covers back at Lew and went stalking out.

Lew could hear him through the open door tramp up the stairs after the others to the floor above. A minute later their heavy footsteps sounded on the ceiling right above his head.

A little runty ten-year-old girl peered in at him from the doorway. He said, “Put that light out! Keep them kids outa here! Leave the door open until they go! Tell your old man to stand there rubber-necking out, like all the others are doing!”

They quit searching in about fifteen minutes, and Lew heard them all go trooping down again, out into the street, and then he could hear their voices from the sidewalk right under the windows.

“Anything doing?” somebody asked.

“Naw, he musta got out through the back yard and the next street over.”

“O’Keefe hurt bad?”

“Nicked him in the dome, stunned him, that was all.” So the cop wasn’t dead.

When Mario came out the front door at eight-thirty on his way to the barber shop where he worked, his “brother-in-law” was with him, as close to him as sticking plaster. Lew had on an old felt hat of Mario’s and a baggy red sweater that hid the coat of Tom’s blue suit. It would have looked too good to come walking out of a building like that on the way to work. That red sweater had cost Lew another fifty. The street looked normal, one wouldn’t have known it for the shooting gallery it had been at four that morning. They walked side by side up toward Second, past the place where O’Keefe had led with his chin, past the corner where the smoke of Lew’s shot had hung so ghostily in the lamplight. There was a newsstand open there now, and Lew bought a paper. Then he and Mario stood waiting for the bus.

It drew up and Lew pushed Mario on alone, and jerked his thumb at the driver. It went sailing off again, before Mario had time to say or do anything, if he’d wanted to. It had sounded to Lew, without knowing Italian, as though the old lady had been coaching Mario to get a stranglehold on the rest of Lew’s money. Lew snickered aloud, ran his hand lightly over the pocket where the original five-hundred was intact once more. It had been too good to miss, the chance she’d given him of sneaking it out of the mattress she’d cached it under and putting it back in his pocket again, while her back was turned. They’d had all their trouble and risk for nothing.

Lew made tracks away from there, went west as far as Third and then started down that. He stayed with the sweater and hat, because they didn’t look out of character on Third. The cops had seen him in the blue suit when they chased him from Rubin’s; they hadn’t seen him in this outfit. And no matter how the signora would blaze when she found out how Lew had gypped them, she couldn’t exactly report it to the police, and tell them what he was wearing, without implicating herself and her old man.