Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“Who’s this guy?” they both wanted to know.

Nelson looked at the first prisoner, in the chair. “Take him out of here a few minutes, can’t you?” he requested. “He don’t have to know all our business.”

“Just like in the story-books,” muttered Sarecky jealously. “One-Man Nelson walks in at the last minute and cops all the glory.”

A cop led Hill upstairs. Another cop brought down a small brown-paper parcel at Nelson’s request. Opened, it revealed a small tin that had once contained cocoa. Nelson turned it upside down and a few threads of whitish substance spilled lethargically out, filling the close air of the room with a faint odor of bitter almonds.

“There’s your cyanide,” he said. “It came off the shelf above Mrs. Avram’s kitchen-stove. Her kids, who are being taken care of at headquarters until I can get back there, will tell you it’s roach-powder and they were warned never to go near it. She probably got it in Detroit, way back last year.”

“She did it?” said the captain. “How could she? It was on the automat-sandwich, not anything he ate at home. She wasn’t at the automat that night, she was home, you told us that yourself.”

“Yeah, she was home, but she poisoned him at the automat just the same. Look, it goes like this.” He unlocked his manacle, refastened his prisoner temporarily to a plumbing-pipe in the corner. He took a paper-napkin out of his pocket, and, from within that, the carefully preserved wax paper wrapper the death-sandwich had been done in.

Nelson said: “This has been folded over twice, once on one side, once on the other. You can see that, yourself. Every crease in it is double-barreled. Meaning what? The sandwich was taken out, doctored, and rewrapped. Only, in her hurry, Mrs. Avram slipped up and put the paper back the other way around.

“As I told Sarecky already, there’s death in little habits. Avram was a miser. Bologna is the cheapest sandwich that automat sells. For six months straight, he never bought any other kind. This guy here used to work there. He knew at what time the slots were refilled for the last time. He knew that that was just when Avram always showed up. And, incidentally, the old man was no fool. He didn’t go there because the light was better — he went there to keep from getting poisoned at home. Ate all his meals out.

“All right, so what did they do? They got him, anyway — like this. Krassin, here, went in, bought a bologna sandwich, and took it home to her. She spiked it, rewrapped it, and, at eleven-thirty, he took it back there in his pocket. The sandwich-slots had just been refilled for the last time. They wouldn’t put any more in till next morning. There are three bologna-slots. He emptied all three, to make sure the victim wouldn’t get any but the lethal sandwich. After they’re taken out, the glass slides remain ajar. You can lift them and reach in without inserting a coin. He put his death-sandwich in, stayed by it so no one else would get it. The old man came in. Maybe he’s near sighted and didn’t recognize Krassin. Maybe he didn’t know him at all — I haven’t cleared that point up yet. Krassin eased out of the place. The old man is a miser. He sees he can get a sandwich for nothing, thinks something went wrong with the mechanism, maybe. He grabs it up twice as quick as anyone else would have. There you are.

“What was in his shoes is this guy’s motive. As for her, that was only partly her motive. She was a congenital killer, anyway, outside of that. He would have married her, and it would have happened to him in his turn some day. She got rid of her first husband, Edwards, in Detroit that way. She got a wonderful break. He ate the poisoned lunch she’d given him way up on the crossbeams of a building under construction, and it looked like he’d lost his balance and toppled to his death. They exhumed the body and performed an autopsy at my request. This telegram says they found traces of cyanide poisoning even after all this time.

“I paid out rope to her tonight, let her know I was onto her. I told her her coffee smelled good. Then I switched cups on her. She’s up there now, dead. I can’t say that I wanted it that way, but it was me or her. You never would have gotten her to the chair, anyway. She was unbalanced of course, but not the kind that’s easily recognizable. She’d have spent a year in an institution, been released, and gone out and done it all over again. It grows on ’em, gives ’em a feeling of power over their fellow human beings.

“This louse, however, is not insane. He did it for exactly one thousand dollars and no cents — and he knew what he was doing from first to last. So I think he’s entitled to a chicken-and-ice-cream-dinner in the death-house, at the state’s expense.”

“The Sphinx,” growled Sarecky under his breath, shrugging into his coat. “Sees all, knows all, keeps all to himself.”

“Who stinks?” corrected the captain, misunderstanding. “If anyone does, it’s you and me. He brought home the bacon!”

Inspector Stephen Lively, off-duty and homeward-bound, stopped at the newsstand underneath the stairs leading up to the Elevated station and selected one of the following day’s newspapers and one of the following month’s magazines for purposes of relaxation. His nightly trip was not only lengthy, it was in two parts — from headquarters to South Ferry by “El” and from there to Staten Island by ferry — hence the two separate items of reading-matter; one for each leg of the way.

Given a combination of two such names as his and, human nature being what it is, what else can you expect in the way of a nickname but — Step Lively? It had started at the age of seven or thereabouts when he stood up in school and pronounced his first name the wrong way; he finally quit struggling against it when it followed him onto the squad and he realized that he was stuck with it for the rest of his days, like it or not.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, only it was altogether inappropriate. Step Lively had never made a quick motion in his life. To watch him was to think of an eight-times-slowed-down film or a deep-sea diver wading through seaweed on the ocean floor; he gave the impression of having been born lazy and getting more so all the time. And the nickname probably made this trait more glaring.

He was not, strangely enough, obese along with it — just the opposite, tall and spare, concave at the waist where others bulge. He carried his head habitually bent forward a little, as though it were too much trouble to hold it up straight. He not only walked slowly, he even talked slowly. What mattered chiefly was that he thought fast; as far as results went, his record on the force seemed to prove that the race isn’t always to the swift. He’d been known to bring in some of the nimblest, most light-footed gentry on record.

Like a steam-roller pursuing a motorcycle; it can’t keep up with it, but it can keep remorselessly after it, wear it down, slowly overtake it, and finally flatten it out. So Step’s superiors didn’t let it worry them too much that he was the despair of traffic-cops crossing a busy street, or that he sent people waiting on line behind him out of their minds. It takes more than that to spoil a good detective.

Step entered the lighted stairway-shed and sighed at the sight of the climb that awaited him, as it did every night. An escalator, like some of the other stations had, would have been so much easier on a man.

The subway, which would have gotten him to the ferry considerably quicker, he eschewed for two very good reasons. One was that he’d have to walk a whole additional block eastward to get to it. And secondly, even though you descended to it instead of climbing at this end, you had to climb up out of it at the other end anyway; he preferred to get the hard work over with at the start, and have a nice restful climb down waiting for him when he got off.