Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“It’s little things like that we’re paid to find out,” Nelson reminded him dryly.

“Pretty large order, isn’t it?”

“You talk like a layman. You’ve been on the squad long enough by now to know how damnably unescapable little habits are, how impossible it is to shake them off, once formed. The public at large thinks detective work is something miraculous like pulling rabbits out of a silk-hat. They don’t realize that no adult is a free agent — that they’re tied hand and foot by tiny, harmless little habits, and held helpless. This man has a habit of taking a snack to eat at midnight in a public place. He has a habit of picking his teeth after he’s through, of lingering on at the table, of looking back over his shoulder aimlessly from time to time. Combine that with a stocky build, a dark complexion, and you have him! What more d’ya want — a spotlight trained on him?”

It was Sarecky, himself, in spite of his misgivings, who picked him up forty-eight hours later in another automat, sample-case and all, at nearly the same hour as the first time, and brought him in for questioning! The busman from the former place, and the two customers, called in, identified him unhesitatingly, even if he was now wearing a gray suit.

His name, he said, was Alexander Hill, and he lived at 215 Such-and-such a street.

“What business are you in?” rapped out the captain.

The man’s face got livid. His Adam’s apple went up and down like an elevator. He could barely articulate the words. “I’m— I’m a salesman for a wholesale drug concern,” he gasped terrifiedly.

“Ah!” said two of his three questioners expressively. The sample-case, opened, was found to contain only tooth-powders, aspirins, and headache remedies.

But Nelson, rummaging through it, thought: “Oh, nuts, it’s too pat. And he’s too scared, too defenseless, to have really done it. Came in here just now without a bit of mental build-up prepared ahead of time. The real culprit would have been all primed, all rehearsed, for just this. Watch him go all to pieces. The innocent ones always do.”

The captain’s voice rose to a roar. “How is it everyone else stayed in the place that night, but you got out in such a hurry?”

“I–I don’t know. It happened so close to me, I guess I–I got nervous.”

That wasn’t necessarily a sign of guilt, Nelson was thinking. It was his duty to take part in the questioning, so he shot out at him: “You got nervous, eh? What reason d’you have for getting nervous? How’d you know it wasn’t just a heart attack or malnutrition — unless you were the cause of it?”

He stumbled badly over that one. “No! No! I don’t handle that stuff! I don’t carry anything like that—”

“So you know what it was? How’d you know? We didn’t tell you,” Sarecky jumped on him.

“I–I read it in the papers next morning,” he wailed.

Well, it had been in all of them, Nelson had to admit.

“You didn’t reach out in front of you — toward him — for anything that night? You kept your hands to yourself?” Then, before he could get a word out, “What about sugar?”

The suspect went from bad to worse. “I don’t use any!” he whimpered.

Sarecky had been just waiting for that. “Don’t lie to us!” he yelled, and swung at him. “I watched you for ten full minutes tonight before I went over and tapped your shoulder. You emptied half the container into your cup!” His fist hit him a glancing blow on the side of the jaw, knocked him and the chair he was sitting on both off-balance. Fright was making the guy sew himself up twice as badly as before.

“Aw, we’re just barking up the wrong tree,” Nelson kept saying to himself. “It’s just one of those fluke coincidences. A drug salesman happens to be sitting at the same table where a guy drops from cyanide poisoning!” Still, he knew that more than one guy had been strapped into the chair just on the strength of such a coincidence and nothing more. You couldn’t expect a jury not to pounce on it for all it was worth.

The captain took Nelson out of it at this point, somewhat to his relief, took him aside and murmured: “Go over there and give his place a good cleaning while we’re holding him here. If you can turn up any of that stuff hidden around there, that’s all we need. He’ll break down like a stack of cards.” He glanced over at the cowering figure in the chair. “We’ll have him before morning,” he promised.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” thought Nelson, easing out. “And then what’ll we have? Exactly nothing.” He wasn’t the kind of a dick that would have rather had a wrong guy than no guy at all, like some of them. He wanted the right guy — or none at all. The last he saw of the captain, he was stripping off his coat for action, more as a moral threat than a physical one, and the unfortunate victim of circumstances was wailing, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,” like a record with a flaw in it.

Hill was a bachelor and lived in a small, one-room flat on the upper West Side. Nelson let himself in with the man’s own key, put on the lights, and went to work. In half an hour, he had investigated the place upside-down. There was not a grain of cyanide to be found, nor anything beyond what had already been revealed in the sample-case. This did not mean, of course, that he couldn’t have obtained some either through the firm he worked for, or some of the retail druggists whom he canvassed. Nelson found a list of the latter and took it with him to check over the following day.

Instead of returning directly to headquarters, he detoured on an impulse past the Avram house, and, seeing a light shining in the basement windows, went over and rang the bell.

The little girl came out, her brother behind her. “Mom’s not in,” she announced.

“She’s out with Uncle Nick,” the boy supplied.

His sister whirled on him. “She told us not to tell anybody that, didn’t she!”

Nelson could hear the instructions as clearly as if he’d been in the room at the time, “If that same man comes around again, don’t you tell him I’ve gone out with Uncle Nick, now!”

Children are after all very transparent. They told him most of what he wanted to know without realizing they were doing it. “He’s not really your uncle, is he?”

A gasp of surprise. “How’d you know that?”

“Your ma gonna marry him?”

They both nodded approvingly. “He’s gonna be our new Pop.”

“What was the name of your real Pop — the one before the last?”

“Edwards,” they chorused proudly.

“What happened to him?”

“He died.”

“In Dee-troit,” added the little boy.

He only asked them one more question. “Can you tell me his full name?”

“Albert J. Edwards,” they recited.

He gave them a friendly push. “All right, kids, go back to bed.”

He went back to headquarters, sent a wire to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Detroit, on his own hook. They were still questioning Hill down to the bone, meanwhile, but he hadn’t caved in yet. “Nothing,” Nelson reported. “Only this account sheet of where he places his orders.”

“I’m going to try framing him with a handful of bicarb of soda, or something — pretend we got the goods on him. I’ll see if that’ll open him up,” the captain promised wrathfully. “He’s not the push-over I expected. You start in at seven this morning and work your way through this list of retail druggists. Find out if he ever tried to contract them for any of that stuff.”

Meanwhile, he had Hill smuggled out the back way to an outlying precinct, to evade the statute governing the length of time a prisoner can be held before arraignment. They didn’t have enough of a case against him yet to arraign him, but they weren’t going to let him go.