Корнелл Вулрич - The Case of the Killer-Diller

And then suddenly, when next she looked, he wasn’t moving at all, not even the tip of his foot now. He was sitting there as still as a statue, almost lifeless. His eyes, which had been on her back until then, were on the mirror themselves now. Had he seen something, caught some slight motion or waver on it, reflected by the closet-door? Had he sensed that this was a trap? If he had—

She watched at more frequent intervals now. He’d stopped looking up at the mirror after that one time she’d caught him at it, was looking steadily down at the floor now. He conveyed an impression of alert wariness, just the same. It wasn’t an abstract, unfocussed look, but a listening, watchful, cagey look.

The thing rose to its crescendo, shattered, stopped dead. The silence was numbing. He didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. A single bead of sweat glistened on his forehead, but the gin could have made him warm after coming out of a steam-room with all his pores open.

She refused to break the spell. Let him be the first to shatter it — for in that lay the answer.

He started to get up slowly. She could see the move coming long before his muscles carried it into effect. His overslung foot descended to the floor. Then there was a wait. His clenched hands drew back along the chair-arms, to give his body better leverage. Then another wait. His waist ballooned out and his knees drew in, straightened, carried his torso up to a standing position. Through it all, the position of his head alone did not change, remained tilted downward toward the floor. That managed to give an impression of secretive, furtive movement to his getting to his feet, like he was stalking someone.

Her nerves were stretched to the breaking-point. She wanted to scream with the suspense of sitting there waiting.

Then his head came up, and he said in the most matter-of-fact way, turning toward the door as he did so: “Guess I’ll shove off. My leg went to sleep.” He limped out into the hall, slapping at it to get back the circulation.

She reeled there at the piano bench, kept herself from falling by grasping the sides of it for a moment. Then she got up and went out after him.

At the door he chucked her under the chin in a big-brotherly sort of way. “S’-long, sweets,” he said. “See you at the bam tomorrow night.” The touch of his fingers, she couldn’t help noticing was ice-cold.

She closed the door after hint and looked behind her. Lindsey had slipped out of the closet, was coming up behind her. She warned him to silence, head tilted toward the door-seam, listening. “Sh! The elevator hasn’t taken him down yet.”

They waited a moment or two. Finally he eased the door open narrowly, peered through with one eye. “It must have, he’s not out there any more.”

“I usually can hear it slide shut.” She walked back into the living-room. “Well, it was no good, Lindsey,” she told him dejectedly, slapping her hands to her sides. “It didn’t work. It was the wrong answer. One time I thought he was getting steamed up, but then he subsided again, almost — almost as though he caught on you were in there.”

“If he did, he’s uncanny. I didn’t move a fingerjoint.” He kneaded his thatch baffledly. “Can’t figure it at all. It had to be the right answer. I still think it is, but — for some reason it muffed fire. It was the right time too, according to what the psychiatrists say. Just before daylight, when anyone’s power of resistance — including a murderer’s — is supposed to be at its lowest ebb.”

“What is there left? I’m so tired and discouraged. I’ll never get Frankie out of there!”

“Yes, you will,” he tried to hearten her. “You get some sleep. We’ll put our heads together again tomorrow. We’re not licked yet.”

She saw him to the door, closed it after him, and went in again. Almost immediately afterward the elevator door down the hall gave a hollow clang that penetrated to where she was. “Funny I didn’t hear that the first time,” she murmured, but didn’t bother any more about it.

She put out the light in the hall, lit up the bedroom, took off her dress, and put on a woollen wrapper. That took about three or four minutes. It was nearly five now, would be getting light in another quarter of an hour. The city, the streets outside, the rest of the building around her, were all silent, dead to the world. She remembered that she’d left the light on in the living-room. She went in there to snap it off. The place was still full of the acrid odor of the weed Dusty had smoked. She opened the window wide to let the fresh air in, stood there a minute, breathing it in.

There was a faint tap at the outside door of the flat, little more than the tick of a nail. She turned her head sharply in that direction to listen, not even sure if she’d heard it herself the first time. It came again, another stealthy little tap.

She moved away from the window and went out there to see. Probably Lindsey, coming back to tell her of some new angle that had just occurred to him. But what a way for him to knock, like an undersized woodpecker. He usually pounded like a pile-driver. He must be getting refined all of a sudden. She wasn’t frightened. The test had failed, and she didn’t stop to think that it might have delayed after-effect.

She opened the door and Dusty Detwiller was standing there. “Gee, I feel terrible bothering you like this,” he apologized softly. “I left the orchestration of that new number I was telling you about on your piano-rack. If you were asleep, I was going away again without disturbing you. That’s why I just tapped lightly like that.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Dusty, I’ll bring it right out to you.” She walked back into the living-room again, started to gather up the loose orchestration sheets and tamp them together. She thought she heard a slight click from the front-door lock, but didn’t pay any attention to it.

Suddenly there was a shadow looming on the wall before her eyes, coming up from behind her, from across her shoulder, the very thing she’d been dreading to see all evening long — and hadn’t until now. The loose orchestration sheets fell out of her hands, landed all over the floor around her feet. She couldn’t move for a minute, even to turn around.

“Don’t scream,” a furry voice purred close to her ear, “or you’ll only bring it on quicker. It won’t do you any good, you’re going to get it anyhow.”

She turned with paralytic slowness and stared into his dilated eyes. His whole face had changed in the few seconds since he’d come in from the door. He must have been holding the murder-lust in leash by sheer will-power until then. “I would have given it to you the first time, but I had a funny feeling we weren’t alone up here. Something told me somebody else was with us. I watched from the stairs going up to the floor above, and I was right. I saw that dick leave.”

His hands started to curve up and in toward her throat with horrible slowness, like the claws of a sluggish lobster. “But now you’re alone, there’s nobody here with you, and I’m going to do it to you. I told you not to play that piece. I don’t want to do these things, but that music makes me.”

If she could only reason with him long enough to get over to that phone on the opposite side of the room. “Dusty, don’t,” she said in a low, coaxing voice. “If you kill me, you know what they’ll do to you.”

His cleverness hadn’t deserted him, even now at the end. “The other guys were up here with you tonight too. They must’ve been — you wouldn’t have tried me out if you didn’t try them out too — so when they find you they still won’t know which of us did it. I got away with it the first three times, and I’ll get away with it this time, too.”