Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Do something,” I kept saying to Westman, “do something!”

Westman drew nothing but blanks. The night doorman, who’d come on duty at six, was obviously greased — or so he said. Then when he went out after the day doorman, who might have been able to mention any callers she’d had earlier in the day, that gentleman had chucked his job two days after the murder and gone home to Ireland or somewhere without leaving any forwarding address. He dug up a former colored maid of hers who would have been a walking card-index of the men in Pascal’s life, and just as he had her nicely subpoenaed and all, she got mysteriously knocked down by a speeding car at 135th and Lenox and had a fine funeral. All wet, all wet.

I sat through it day after day, in the last row behind a pair of smoked glasses. The jury came in on the 21st with their shirts sticking to their backs and stubble on their jaws and found him guilty.

I keeled over and a court attendant carried me outside, but no one noticed because people had been passing out from the heat the whole time the trial lasted.

It was nice and cool when he came up for sentence, but it was too late to do any good by that time. Jackie got the chair.

“So my husband goes up in sparks for something he never did!” I said to Westman.

“Ten million people think he did, one little lady thinks he didn’t. You can’t buck the State of New York.”

“No, but I can give it a run for its money. What do you need for a stay of execution?”

“New evidence — something I haven’t got.”

“No? Watch me. How long have we got?”

“Week of November Eighth. Six weeks to us, a lifetime to him.” At the door I turned back. “The five centuries, I suppose, was to pay for the current they’re going to use on him.”

He threw up his hands. “You can have the retainer back. I feel worse about it than you do.”

I took it because I needed it. I’d been living in a seven-dollar-a-week furnished room and eating corn flakes, since I’d retained him. Now here was the job — to separate the one right person from the 6,999,999 wrong ones — or whatever the population of New York was at the last census — and hang the killing of Bernice Pascal on him so that it would stick and give my Jackie an out.

Six weeks to do it in. Forty-two days. A thousand hours. And here was the equipment: five hundred dollars, a face like an angel and a heart like a rock. The odds? A thousand to one against me was putting it mild. Who could stand up and cheer about anything so one-sided?

I just sat there holding my head in my hands and wondering what my next move was. Not a suspicion, not a hunch, not a ghost of an idea. It was going to be tough going all right. I couldn’t figure it out and the minutes were already ticking away, minutes that ticked once and never came back again.

They let me say goodbye to Jackie next day before they took him upstate. He was cuff-linked, so we didn’t have much privacy. We didn’t say much.

“Look at me. What do you see?”

“You’ve got a funny kind of light in your eyes,” he said.

“It’s going to bring you back alive,” I said, “so never mind the goodbyes.”

When I got back to the room there was a cop there. “Oh-oh,” I thought, “now what?”

“I been looking all over for you,” he said. “Mr. Westman finally tipped me off where I could find you. Your husband asked us to turn his things over to you.”

He passed me Jackie’s packed valise, the one he’d taken up to her house that night.

“Thanks for rubbing it in,” I said, and shut him out.

I never knew what punishment shirts and socks and handkerchiefs could hand out until I opened it and started going through it. His gray suit was in it, too. I held the coat up against my face and sort of made love to it. The cops had been through the pockets a million times of course but they’d put everything back. A couple of cards from liquor concerns, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, his silver pencil clamped onto the breast pocket.

Being a Sing Sing widow already, I spread them all out in front of me in a sort of funeral arrangement. It was when I started smoothing out the coat and folding it over that I felt something down at the bottom — in one of the seams. He’d had a hole in the lining of his side pocket and it had slipped through, out of reach. But when I’d worked it back up into the light again, I saw the cops hadn’t missed much. It was just a folder of matches.

I put it down. Then I picked it up again. It wasn’t a commercial folder of matches. There wasn’t an ad on it. It was a private folder, a personal folder. Fancy. Black cover with two gilt initials on it — T.V. You can pick them up at the five-and-ten at a dime a throw; or at any department store for two bits. Just the same, it belonged to one single person and not to any hotel or grillroom or business enterprise of any kind. T.V. It hadn’t been Bernice’s because those weren’t her initials.

Where had he gotten hold of it then? I knew who most of his friends were, she’d been the only dark horse in his life, and none of their names matched the two letters. Just to check up, I went out and called up the firm he’d worked for.

“T.V. there?” I asked off-handedly.

“No one by those initials works here,” the office girl said.

It was when I went back to the room again that the brain-wave hit me. I suddenly had it. He had picked them up at Bernice’s apartment after all, he must have — without their being hers. Somebody else had called on her, absentmindedly left his matches lying around the place, and then Jackie had showed up. He was lit up and, without noticing, put them in his pocket and walked off with them.

Even granting that — and it was by no means foolproof — it didn’t mean much of anything. It didn’t mean that “T.V.” had anything to do with her death. But if I could only get hold of one person who had known her intimately, I’d be that much ahead, I could find out who some of the rest of her friends were.

“T.V.” was elected. Just then I looked over in the corner and saw a cockroach slinking back to its hole. I shivered. That — and all the other cockroaches I’d been seeing for weeks — did the trick. I got an idea.

First a folder of matches, then a cockroach. I dolled up and went around to the building she’d lived in — 225. I dug up the superintendent. “Listen, I want to talk to you about 3-H,” I said. “Have you rented it yet?”

“No,” he said, “and God knows when we’ll be able to. People are funny about things like that, it was in all the papers.”

I made him take me up and I took a look around. The phone was still in, disconnected, of course. The phone books were lying on the floor in the clothes closet. Everything else was gone long ago.

“Nice roomy closet you have here,” I said, fluttering the leaves of the Manhattan directory. Then I put it down and came out again. You have to have good eyes to be able to see in a dim closet. Mine are good.

“I’ll make you a proposition,” I said. “I’m not at all superstitious, and I haven’t got much money, and I don’t like the brand of cockroaches over at my place. You haven’t got an earthly chance of renting this place until people forget about what happened and you know it. I’ll take it for exactly one quarter of what she was paying. Think it over.”

He went down, phoned the real-estate agents, came back again, and the place was mine. But only for six weeks; or, in other words, until just around the time Jackie was due to hit the ceiling — which suited me fine as that was only as long as I wanted it for anyway.

The minute the door had closed behind him and I was alone in the place, I made a bee line for that clothes closet and hauled out the Manhattan directory. I held it upside down and shook it and the card fell out, the one I’d seen the first time. It was just one of those everyday quick-reference indexes ruled off into lines for names and numbers that the phone company supplies to its subscribers.