Cornell Woolrich: The Dog with the Wooden Leg

Then the sound of Burkhardt uncapping the receptacle, the rustling of the loose tobacco as he dredged it, and then another pause, more awful than the first. He was probably holding up the two hundred dollars. There was an intake of breath from Celia. The detective said, speaking softly, so Marty knew it was to her — people had told him she was pretty:

“Tell me the truth, now, and don’t try to cover him up. Did you ever see this before? Did you know it was here in the house with you?”

She was loyal to the bitter end; she didn’t answer. But the detective answered his own question.

“Your face tells me you didn’t. We’ll leave you out of this. Come along, Marty Campbell; there’s a few things we’d like to know, that you can tell us.”

A hand descended on his shoulder, but not roughly. Dick bristled a little at the liberty, and it was Marty who silenced him, himself. “He’s the only one who could clear me,” he thought poignantly, “and he can’t talk.” He stood up submissively.

“I got that money from panhandling in the park... not actively, just by sitting there with a tin cup alongside me,” he said. “But I guess it’s no use expecting you to believe me any more.”

“Two hundred dollars?” was all the detective said pointedly.

“I been doing it for five years past. Dick’s wooden leg gets them, is a big attraction.”

Then from the open doorway he turned and made one final plea. “You believe me, don’t you, Celia? No matter how it looks, you don’t believe I’d do anything like that, do you?”

The stifled silence of the room behind him gave him the answer.

They started down the tenement stairs, Burkhart incautiously in the lead, to guide Marty, the latter feeling his way down after him, one hand pinned between the detective’s arm and his body, more to show him the way down than to hold him fast, the other trailing the banister railing. Dick zigzagged disgruntedly at the rear, trying to force his way past to the front and assume his rightful duties, now taken over by this stranger.

Marty went to his impending disgrace in bitter silence, too proud to plead his innocence any more with the cards stacked against him the way they were. What hurt most was that even Celia seemed to think that where there was that much smoke, there must be a little fire.

He wouldn’t have done what he did — he was in hot water enough already without adding to it — but as they rounded the turn of the landing, he crowded Burkhardt slightly and the latter’s gun, bedded in his hip pocket, grazed him. It would be so easy to— The idea leaped into his mind then and there, full-grown, and he acted on it without giving himself time to lose his nerve.

There was a light bulb hanging directly over the landing on a loose cord, he knew — a light that he couldn’t see and didn’t need, but that Burkhardt did. And the next one was a full floor below. His captor’s gun at his own fingertips, his captor’s eyesight at the mercy of a fragile filament in a vacuum, and Dick at his heels — the combination was too favorable to pass by, and Marty had to have freedom of action to square himself with Celia.

He lifted his right hand from the rail as they rounded the turn, crossed it under the pinioned one, closed it around that wedge-shaped butt protruding from Burkhardt’s hip — whisk! and up it came, described an arc over the rail, and went dropping down four floors to the bottom of the stair well. He couldn’t risk retaining it himself; it would have been too easy for Burkhardt to get it back again.

Before the detective had even had time to whirl completely around at the feel of it gone, that same hand had flapped upward in a violent fly-swatting motion. Luck was with him, blind luck for a blind man. His fingertips grazed the tip of the bulb; an eighth of an inch lower and they would have only fanned it. It danced violently away at the end of its cord, hit the ceiling, and pop! — no more light.

Even while the glass capsule was still in the act of flying apart all around its luminous core, he’d shrilled the command, “Get him, Dick! Hold him down!” He bent over double as though he were playing leapfrog, something long and heavy swept over him, there was a thump of two colliding bodies, and Burkhardt went down on the landing with a crash that shook the whole stair structure.

Dick knew just how to do it, and Burkhardt seemed to know enough about this kind of dog not to resist; that would have cost his life. There wasn’t a move out of him as he lay pinned there flat on his back, just the sound of his tense, heavy breathing. The dog’s fangs must have been bared right over his jugular.

“Lie still or he’ll tear your throat!” Marty warned. “Don’t call out!” He hobbled quickly up to his own floor again. Celia had thrown open the apartment door at the sound of the fall, was standing out there, unable to see in the dark. He caught her by the edge of the dress, tugged at it.

“Hurry up! Dick’s got him! Bring that clothesline from the fire escape. You’ve got to help me bring him back up here!”

“Gramp! Isn’t it bad enough already. without—”

“I’ve got to have a chance to square myself, and this is the only way I’ll get it. They’ll send me away, Celia, for something I never did!”

“But, gramp, they’ll only get you in the end, and then it’ll be worse.”

“All I ask is a chance to clear my name. Celia, won’t you see that I get it?”

Burkhardt, who must have overheard them, spoke softly from where he lay helpless in the dark. “You’re making her an accomplice if you talk her into laying a hand on me—” Dick’s warning snarl cut him short.

The veiled threat in it seemed to decide her, womanlike, to do the opposite. “I have no one but you, gramp,” she said impulsively. “Whether you did or didn’t, you’re going to have your chance!”

She turned and ran back into the flat, came out again with the clothesline. Between them they trussed up the seething detective, under the compulsion of Dick’s menacing teeth, thrust a handkerchief loosely into his mouth, got him up into the flat again somehow. They sat him down in a chair, with Dick still the chief restraining influence.

“His gun’s down there at the bottom of the stairs; go down and get it before someone sees it,” Marty ordered.

When she returned with it, they closed the door on the captor who had now become captive.

“He said he had another man waiting outside the house,” she reminded Marty anxiously.

“I don’t believe it; that was just to make me go along quietly. Why should it take two of them?”

“But they’ll miss him at his headquarters, won’t they?”

“Maybe, but they won’t find him right away; he came here on his own.”

“But, gramp, we can’t keep him here forever!”

“That’s up to him. Take the gag out of his mouth, Celia. If he tries to yell, put it back in again.” To the detective he said: “You still won’t believe me that I’m not guilty of passing out that stuff?”

“Now less than ever,” was the immediate retort.

“Then you’re going to stay here until I can square myself.”

“And how do you expect to do that?”

Marty felt for a chair, sat down opposite the prisoner’s voice. “Listen to me. You know what you know: that an addict received cocaine out of Dick’s wooden leg. I know what I know: that I didn’t put it there, or know it was there. How’d it get there, then? Even a blind man like me can figure that out. Every day on my way to the park, people stop around me, even go so far as to bend down, fiddle with Dick’s leg. One of them put it in, I carried it into the park, and it was received at the other end, all without my knowing it. Much safer for them, since you people were on the warpath.”