Корнелл Вулрич - The Case of the Killer-Diller

In the streets outside it was broad daylight already, but down in the basement-room night shadows still lingered on. Through stratified layers of hours-old cigarette smoke, unable to find its way out of the poorly ventilated place, two motionless forms, both in grotesque postures, were indistinctly visible. One was a girl huddled asleep on a piano bench, her head and arms resting on the keyboard. The other was a man, toes pointed downward, head on chest, finger-tips touching his sides, as though he were staring entranced at something on the floor.

The basement itself was no different from any other sub-street-level space of its kind. Bare whitewashed walls, an oblong vent fitted with opaque wire-meshed glass high up on one side, that looked out at about the level of passersby’s insteps, an array of steam and water pipes of varying girths that ran out parallel to the ceiling for half its length, then disappeared through it by means of elbow-joints. It was what the cellar contained that set it apart.

There were numbers of ordinary, unpainted wooden kitchen chairs scattered about, most of them overturned. For nearly every chair there was a complementary gin bottle lying discarded somewhere nearby — empty or with only a finger’s-width left in it at the most — and a musical instrument: trap-drum, clarinet, sax, and so on. There was a table too, scalloped around the edges with cigarette burns, some of them with ash cylinders still in them. Loose orchestration sheets and more empty bottles littered its surface, bringing the bottle ratio up to nearly two per chair.

A venturesome cockroach traveled across an orchestration-leaf of Ravel’s Bolero that had fallen to the floor. It didn’t look so different from the other notes, except that it was bigger and kept moving slowly along the clef-bars instead of staying in one place. There was a peculiar acrid pungency in the air that didn’t come from liquor, and that no ordinary cigarette ever made either.

As the daylight filtered in more and more strongly through the clouded sidewalk-level pane, the girl who slept with her arms on top of the yellowed piano-keys, stirred a little, raised her head. Nearly two whole octaves of pressed-down keys, freed of her weight, reared up into place with a series of little clashing discords. The sound woke her more fully.

“In the groove,” she murmured dreamily, and blinked her eyes open.

Her silky butterscotch-colored hair, worn smooth and long, came tumbling down over her face, and she brushed it back with one hand. Then her eyes went upward, took in the other figure, who seemed to be dancing there before her in the hazy air, to unheard notes. She shot up from the piano-bench.

“Hal!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing up—” She choked it off short. He was being dead up there, hanging by his neck from a thick electric cord that looped down between two of the exposed steam pipes.

She stumbled back against the keyboard and her hand struck it, brought forth another discordant jangle. She sidestepped, terrified even by that harmless sound. The exploring cockroach scampered off the orchestration-sheet, scurried back toward its cranny.

“They’ve all gone, left me here alone with... it,” she sobbed.

She stared distractedly at the overturned chairs, turned and fought her way through the stagnant air toward the closed wooden door at the back of the place.

She threw it open and looked up and down the dim basement passage lit by a single wan bulb. Rows of empty ashcans were pyramided at one end of it. She was on the verge of hysteria by now. It was not alone what she had just seen, it was also partly due to the depression that always set in after the over-stimulation of one of those jam-sessions — a sort of musical hang-over, so to speak. How the men in the outfit must be feeling, she could only imagine. She didn’t drink gin or blaze reefers the way they did.

“Fred! Frankie! Dusty!” she whispered hoarsely, standing there in the open doorway. The long brick-walled passage echoed to it hollowly, like a tomb. She shuddered, crouched back against the wall. A black cat slunk out between two of the ashcans and she gave a tinny little bleat, half superstitious reflex, half actual alarm.

A door grated open far down at the other end of the passage and a grizzled old man in overalls looked out at her. Instinctively she reached behind her, pulled shut the door of the room from which she had just come, so he couldn’t look in if he should pass by. “Oh. Mr. Hoff, did the boys — did the rest of the crew leave already?” she faltered.

He shrugged as he shuffled down the passage toward her. “If they ain’t in there, then they must have gone. I tell you one thing, I be glad if they go and never come back. Such noise! What the landlord was thinking about to rent them a room down here. With three doors in between I still heard it.” He was opposite the closed door now and she was standing in front of it, as though to prevent him from going in. She was loyal to the men she worked with. This was a matter that concerned the entire orchestra. She had to find the others first, consult them, before she let a stranger—

“Have you got a cigarette, Mr. Hoff?”

Her bag was somewhere inside there, with a package of cigarettes in it, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back in again — and facing that — to get it. He gave her a loose one from his overall pocket, scraped a kitchen match down the brickwork. The cigarette shook pitifully in her hand and kept on shaking even after she had it lit and between her lips.

“Yah, look at you,” he said disapprovingly. “Fine life for a young girl, shtaying up all night banging and hollering with a bunch of drunk musickaners! You bet if you vas my daughter—”

He’d often said that to her, but today, for the first time, she was inclined to agree with him.

“I’d like to give it up myself,” she said sickly.

He trudged on up the passage toward his daily chores and disappeared around a corner. She threw down the cigarette she had just lit, tried the door to make sure it was securely closed, then fled up the passage in the other direction. She opened a door, ran up a flight of basement steps, came out at the rear of the ground-floor hallway of the cheap “residence club,” that was just a rooming-house under another name. A couple of the orchestra members had rooms here in the building.

She ran around to the front, up the main stairs to the second floor — the place had no elevator — and knocked briefly on a door near the head of the stairs. She threw it open — the knock was just for propriety’s sake — and looked in.

Fred Armstrong, the outfit’s clarinet-player, was lying soddenly on his back on the bed, mouth open to the ceiling, the gin bottle he’d brought up from downstairs still clutched in his hand, as though it were too precious to let go even after everything it had had in it was inside him instead.

She shook him fruitlessly a few times, tried to rouse him by calling “Fred! Fred!” urgently in his ear. His mouth didn’t even close. He’d be that way for hours, she realized. She turned and ran out again, closing the door after her.

Halfway to the stairs again she stopped short in her tracks, turned aside. There was a little enamel sign sticking out at right-angles to the wall — Bath. A flicker of motion from the partly open door had caught her eye. She pushed it open and saw a pale-faced youth her own age, standing there looking at her. Strings of damp hair straggled down over his forehead. His coat-collar was turned up around his neck, and he had a black eye.