Корнелл Вулрич - The Case of the Killer-Diller

“But who’ll you get to do your canarying for you?” she choked, fighting desperately for time. She glanced once too often toward the phone, gauging its distance. He jumped sideways, like an ungainly dancing-bear on its hind legs, grabbed the phone-wire and tore it bodily out of the control-box.

Then he came back at her again, hands in that pincer-formation aiming at her throat.

She screamed harrowingly, unable to hold it in any longer, shifted madly sideways away from those oncoming, stretching hands, until the far wall blocked her and she was penned up in the angle formed by the two walls, unable to get any further away from him. The window she had opened before he came in was just ahead, in the new direction. “I’ll jump out if you come a step nearer,” she panted.

He was too quick. He darted in, the hands snaked out, locked around her throat just as she came in line with window-frame. For an instant they formed a writhing mass under one of the curtains.

There was a flash. His protruding eyes lit up yellowly as if he were a tiger, and then there was a deafening detonation beside her face that almost stunned her.

His hands unlocked again, but so slowly that she had to pry them off with her own before she was free of them. Then he went crazily down to the floor. His body fell across one of her feet, pinning her there. She just stood there coughing. A man’s leg came over the windowsill alongside of her, and then Lindsey was standing there holding her up with one arm around her, a fuming gun still in his other hand.

“Thank God there’s a fire-escape outside that window,” he breathed heavily. “I never would have made it in time coming up the inside way!”

He had to step over Detwiller with her in his arms, to get her to the piano-bench and sit her down.

“How’d you know I was in danger up here?” she asked.

“I didn’t for sure. I just saw something that struck me as a little strange.” He stopped, colored up a little. “I may as well admit I’ve gone kind of mushy. Every time I leave here I — sort of cross over and stand on the other side of the street watching your window until the lights go out. I was down there, and I saw you open this one and then turn your head quickly and stand there as if you were listening or heard something. I waited, but you didn’t come back again, and finally I started on my way. But the more I thought it over, the stronger my hunch got that everything wasn’t just the way it should be. I knew it wasn’t your phone you’d heard, because you wouldn’t have to stand there listening like that. You’d hear it without any trouble. So what else could it be but someone at your front door? By the time I got a block away, it got the better of me. I turned around and came running back — and I took the fire-escape to save time.”

“So you call that being mushy. Well you can’t be too mushy for me.” She looked over at the floor by the window. “Is he gone?” She shuddered.

“No, he’s not gone. He’ll live to take the blame for what he’s done. Only for him it’ll be an asylum, not the chair.” Detwiller stared at them vacantly.

“So now we know,” she murmured.

“Yes, now we know.”

Musician’s union.

Secretary of the union.