Brett Halliday - She Woke to Darkness

“Don’t… please,” Aline pleaded, her cheeks scarlet. “Maybe I’m just a two-dollar whore at heart, but don’t rub it in. Tell me what else Joe said.”

“Well, he gave you the dime and you went to the telephone book and looked up a number. When you found it, you asked him if he had a pencil and would he write it down for you. You know, the phone booth is across the room and I guess you were afraid you’d forget it before you could dial it.”

“Did he write it down?” She asked fearfully.

“Yes. On one of the business cards advertising the place. You called it out to him, went over and took the card, then went back to the booth and closed the door.”

Aline nerved herself to ask, “Does Joe remember the number?”

“No. He thought it was a Butterfield number, but wasn’t positive. He says you stayed in the booth awhile, then came out and marched out without saying a word or even looking at him. And that’s all Joe knows.”

Aline was quiet for a moment, racking her tortured mind for a glimpse of remembrance that would not come. “If I only knew who I called,” she moaned.

“At least we know you didn’t call me,” Ralph said ruefully. “Even though you wanted a man, you had given me to understand quite clearly that I wasn’t the one you wanted. Try to think of someone else,” he went on calmly, glancing aside at her with lowered lids, “whom you felt a yen for when you were sober, but didn’t quite have the nerve to approach.”

“I can’t think,” she murmured, and then her voice rose angrily as she declared, “The hell of it is that I’m not the bitch I seem to become when I’m drunk. So how do I know what man I had a yen for? If Joe had only remembered that number!”

“Well,” said Ralph smugly, “it just happens that I’m not so bad when it comes to playing detective. I bought Joe a drink for his trouble, and over-tipped him, so you needn’t bother to give him back his dime. Then I went over to the phone booth and looked around inside. I found this lying on the floor.”

Ralph dramatically handed her a crumpled business card which he had taken from his pocket. Scrawled on the back, in pencil, were the letters BU, followed by five digits.

“I can’t swear that’s the number you called,” he pointed out judicially, “but I think it is. You didn’t have a handbag to put it in, and no pockets in your dress. You probably just crumpled it up and threw it on the floor after you’d reached your party.”

Aline took the card. Her eyes were round and frightened as she repeated the numbers aloud, and her head moved slowly from side to side. “It doesn’t sound even remotely familiar,” she told him. “Does it to you?”

“No. But I don’t know all your men friends. Sure you can’t remember?”

“I haven’t even the ghost of an idea,” she acknowledged, absently turning the card over and over with her fingers. “But isn’t there some way to get a person’s name from a number? Doesn’t the Telephone Company have a cross index… or something?”

“Of course. But I don’t think they give out information like that, as a rule, unless it’s requested by the police.” He finished his drink, put an arm around her and nuzzled his lips against her ear. “How about forgetting the whole thing for tonight? Let’s go to bed and get a couple of hours sleep. Everything will be bright and rosy tomorrow.”

“Ralph… don’t!” Her voice lashed out at him She struggled against his embrace, broke free and pushed him away. Then, seeing the strange expression on his face she managed a wan smile and said, “You’ve been sweet to try and help me, Ralph, and you have helped a lot. Now I know, at least, that I didn’t just pick up some complete stranger on the street at midnight. I feel more decent knowing that I looked up a number and telephoned.”

“Sure,” he said in a soothing tone. “And after you’ve had a good sleep, maybe you’ll remember a name to fit the number.” He stood up. “Okay, sweet. If you want to be alone, far be it from me to intrude. Bye now.” He turned and strode out.

My doorbell buzzed just as I reached that point in Elsie’s manuscript. The sound rasped angrily in the utter silence of the hotel room, and I must have jumped a foot.

The cops, I thought. Here it is, Mr. Halliday. Gird up your loins and prepare for one of those interrogations you’ve described in your books so often. The innocent hero striving desperately to convince the cynical and brutal bluecoats that he is innocent.

I laid Elsie’s manuscript down unhappily, wishing to God they’d given me time to finish reading it, went to the door and opened it.

In all my life I’ve never seen such a welcome sight as Ed Radin’s broad face wearing a friendly grin. I wrung his hand hard and pulled him inside and demanded, “How bad is it, Ed? What did you find out?”

“It’s pretty bad, Brett.” He shook his head and moved his solid body across to the brandy glass and bottle. He poured himself a moderate drink, downed it, and sat down wearily. “I just came from the apartment. She was strangled in the sitting room, fully clothed and no evidence of much struggle. Probably no sex angle. They think she had been drinking with the guy and he went crazy mad when she turned down his advances. Two kinds of cigarettes in the ashtray, fingerprints on the cognac glass. Yours, you think?” He regarded me steadily.

“Probably. Unless she washed out my glass before she admitted the killer. Anything else?”

“Not much. No one on the premises heard anything. Police went there on an anonymous telephone tip saying there was a dead woman in that apartment. Shortly after they found her, there was a phone call but when a cop answered, the caller hung up. They theorize that was the killer checking to see if they’d found her okay.”

“It was my call,” I told him wearily. “I phoned for the exact reason I told you. I’d read the first chapter of her script and I thought I’d call back. You know how amateur writers are. They can hardly hold their water while someone is reading their stuff.”

“I know,” he said stolidly, “but not many cops do. So, why didn’t you identify yourself to the cop?”

“Would you have?” I asked hotly. “Hell, Ed. It was about two o’clock in the morning. I call the gal and a man answers. Wouldn’t you discreetly hang up?”

“Probably,” he admitted as stolidly as before, “but I’m just asking the questions the cops are going to ask you. You’ve got a few hours, I guess, to get the answers ready. Soon as the morning papers are out, someone who saw you leave the banquet with Elsie will phone the information in. The rest is routine.”

“I don’t need to fix any answers,” I told him. “The truth will have to do.”

He said, “Fine,” and I knew he meant it. Ed Radin is strictly an honorable guy, and I knew he’d stretched a point very fine when he withheld the information that I had tipped him off to check Elsie.

He settled back and lit a cigarette and closed his eyes lightly and said, “Go back over it for me, Brett. Everything. From the moment you met Elsie until you phoned me.”

I went back over it. Every bit of it. Every word and inflection that had passed between us. Every kiss and every tiny bit of sex play. It was easy to tell a friend exactly how I had felt about Elsie, how I thought she felt about me… just what passed between us. I realized as I talked that it was going to be more difficult to tell the police the same things, much more difficult to make them understand. Ed was my friend, and he is a writer, too. He knows how things like that happen to a man, and that nothing I told him gave me any motive for murdering her. But that was because he knew me, and understood the sort of girl Elsie had been.