Brett Halliday - She Woke to Darkness

Turning from the mirror, she kicked off scuffed mules and got clean stockings from a drawer. God, she felt good after her self-imposed penance. Bart always gave good parties. He hadn’t said who’d be there tonight, but some of the gang, certainly. They would be glad to welcome her back into circulation. Some of them knew what had happened last time at Betty Elaine’s party. Well, not exactly everything, but enough to guess at the rest. And they would help her tonight. They were good kids. They didn’t like to see a girl like Aline make a complete fool of herself.

She slipped on her alligator pumps and chose the gold and blue print dress. It set off her slim waist and nice hips, and the heart-shaped neckline was flattering.

She hadn’t bothered to telephone that she had changed her mind and decided to attend the party. It didn’t matter. There would be a dozen or more anyway, with others dropping in later or leaving early.

She took one more short rye before going out. Just enough to give her that final lift that made an evening in New York so challenging and exciting to a girl who had been sedately reared in the mid-west.

Yes. It would have been about eight-thirty when she reached Bart’s apartment in the Village. She remembered paying the taxi fare and waiting impatiently while the driver made change for a five. It was eight-thirty. There had been a clock across the street above the entrance to a cellar restaurant. She had left the taxi driver the silver, and put the four bills in the small alligator handbag and gone up the steps…

Her handbag! Where was it?

Aline Ferris sat upright and looked wildly around the hotel bedroom. It was nowhere in sight. She dragged herself from the bed and waveringly made her way to the chest of drawers, frantically opened each one to find it empty. She searched the closet and looked under the bed without result. She opened the bathroom door.

Light from the bedside table spilled through the doorway onto the body of a man sprawled on the bathroom floor. His head was near the door, inches from Aline’s stockinged feet, and there was blood on the white tiles.

That was the first chapter of Elsie Murray’s manuscript. I laid it aside and tossed off the rest of my cognac, thinking about Elsie and what she had told me about the script.

She did write pretty well for a beginner. With a lot of emotional intensity and feeling. Of course, the trouble in evaluating her as a writer came from the fact that I knew she was writing about an actual situation. If she had told me the truth back in her apartment, this whole thing had happened to her. She was Aline Ferris who had waked up in a strange hotel room and found a corpse in the bathroom.

I got up and paced back and forth while I wondered about Elsie. She had talked about the story as though it were an unsolved mystery. It was an intriguing situation for a book. If she had a good solution for it and could keep up the pace of the first chapter, it could well turn into a damned fine mystery.

But that was her trouble, of course. As she, herself, recognized. Almost anyone can describe interestingly something they have experienced personally. But without experience and a lot of solid craftsmanship, it’s very difficult to create situations and characters. She probably never would be able to finish the book.

But perhaps I could help her. I told myself it would be fun trying. It would be interesting to discuss the script with her, and find out exactly how closely she resembled the Aline Ferris in her story.

If she was a gal who passed out on her third martini and developed nympho tendencies… that made it all the more interesting.

I glanced at my watch and saw it was almost two o’clock. I remembered how she had kissed me just before her telephone rang, and mentally added up the number of drinks she had tossed off during the evening. It was more than three, that was a cinch. But she certainly hadn’t been even close to passing out with me.

Or… had she? How could one be certain? The way she described herself in the story, it was much more a mental blackout than a physical one that overtook her.

Maybe she had been on the verge of passing out while I was there. It was an interesting speculation.

I caught myself glancing down at the manila envelope with her telephone number penciled on it. She’d hardly be asleep yet, I thought. She’d be lying awake wondering if I had started to read her script, frightened to death that I’d think it horrible, yet very sure in her own mind that it was a masterpiece and that I’d recognize it as such.

It wasn’t difficult to convince myself that I really owed it to Elsie’s peace of mind to telephone her and say I thought the first chapter extremely good. I could do that honestly, and I knew I might have reservations if I waited to read more.

I went into my bedroom and gave the Murray Hill number to the hotel operator.

I heard Elsie’s telephone ring twice before there was a click and a man’s voice said, “Hello.”

I replaced my receiver very quietly without answering. I sat there on the side of the bed looking down at the instrument and thinking hard.

I could be mistaken.

But I didn’t think I was mistaken. I’ve worked with and around cops enough years to recognize the official sound of a policeman’s voice.

What was a cop doing in Elsie Murray’s apartment? Answering her telephone at two o’clock in the morning?

Of course, there had been that other telephone call which had made her so anxious to get rid of me. Maybe her jealous boy-friend was a dick. But why did he answer her phone instead of letting her do the honors?

I began to sweat a little as I sat there thinking it over. I’ve got too much imagination, of course. And I’ve worked around the police and criminals so much that I’m overly conscious of what can happen in this modern world of ours. The average man just doesn’t think about such things. He reads about murders and rapes in the paper, but they are always happening to someone else. It simply doesn’t occur to him that anything of that nature could ever come close to him.

I’ve noticed that time and again when covering a case with Mike Shayne. A man’s wife goes out for the evening, for instance, leaving him home with the kiddies. He goes to sleep at ten o’clock, expecting her back later, and wakes up in the morning to discover she hasn’t returned.

Does he get frightened and call the police at once? Not your normal, average American citizen. He doesn’t want to make himself conspicuous. He thinks the police would laugh at him for worrying. He thinks of a dozen plausible explanations for his wife’s absence. And deep down inside him is the positive assurance that nothing can possibly have happened to his wife. So he sends the kids to school and goes off to work, and it isn’t until that night or maybe even the next day that he allows himself to become worried enough to call the Missing Persons Bureau. By that time, she’s probably been stiff in the morgue for twenty-four hours.

If anything had happened at Elsie Murray’s apartment that had brought the police in, I wanted to know about it. I had Elsie’s lipstick on my mouth, and my fingerprints were in her place. A dozen or more people had seen us leave the banquet together.

The first chapter of her manuscript had something to do with my feeling, I suppose. Reading that, and knowing that she was depicting herself in Aline Ferris.

I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t see what I could do. I couldn’t afford to call police headquarters and ask if something had happened to Elsie. If anything had, I’d be mixed up in it soon enough without volunteering any information. I reminded myself that I wasn’t in Miami now, and the name of Brett Halliday simply didn’t swing any weight in New York.