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

“See how it works?” I said. “Drop around sometime and we’ll be glad to give you a job — scrubbing the floor.” So she had a guy with her when she left. That explained who had done the smoking in the clothes closet up there. Clothes are too sacred to a woman, whether they’re her own or not, for her to risk getting sparks on them. It would take a man not to give a damn where he lit up.

It was still all balled up to me. The best I could do was this: the lady-visitor had arrived first, openly, and been let in by Mrs. Fraser. Then when Mrs. F. wasn’t looking she had slipped a male accomplice into the flat and he’d hidden in the closet and waited for a favorable opportunity to jump out and give her the works. I scratched the part out of my hair. That was lousy, it stank. First, because the woman had gone right up to the super of her own free will and let him take a good look at her when it would have been easy enough to avoid that. Second, because she was a blonde, and the hairpin I’d picked up was a black one. Third, because it was Mrs. Fraser herself and not anyone else who had gone around planting suspicion against her husband. You might almost say that she had lent a hand in her own murder.

I went up to 4-C again, giving myself a scalp treatment on the way. The cop was still outside the door. “Never mind trying to hide your cigarette behind you,” I said, “you’re liable to burn yourself where it won’t do you any good.” No more reporters, they had a deadline, and the medical examiner had gone too. She was still in there, on the living-room floor now, waiting to go out. “Oh, by the way,” I mentioned, “I’m holding the husband down in my place, in case you guys want to take a look at him.” They almost fell over each other in their hurry to get out and at him. “He didn’t do it,” I called after them, but I knew better than to expect them to listen to me.

I followed them out and right away another door down the hall opened an inch or two. It was just Mrs. Katz of 4-E trying to get a free look at the body when it was carried out. I beckoned to her and she came the rest of the way out, pounds and pounds of her. I liked Mrs. K. at sight. I bet she cooked a mean bowl of noodles. “Maybe you can tell me something I’d like to know.”

She finished swallowing the marshmallow she was chewing on. “Sure, sure, maybe I’ll get my name in the papers, huh? Poppa, come here.”

“No, never mind Poppa. Did you see anyone go in there yesterday to call on her, in a black dress?”

“No,” she said, “but somebody in a black dress was coming out. I met them down by the elevator when I was coming home from the grocer, a man and a woman together. They didn’t live in the building so maybe they was visiting.”

“Big bow on her hat?”

She nodded excitedly. “Sure, sure.”

“That’s them. Blond, wasn’t she?”

“Get out! Dark — darker as I am even.”

I wheeled her around on her base and pushed her back in again. I had it now! The super met her coming in and he said she was blond. Mrs. Katz passed her going out and said she was dark. Well, they were both right. She’d come in blond and she’d gone out brunette.

I ran all the way downstairs to the basement and dragged the super away from his radio. “What time do you start the fire in the incinerator?”

“Not until after midnight,” he said. “Let it burn out between then and morning.”

“Then all today’s rubbish is still intact?”

“Sure. I never touch it until the tenants are all asleep.”

“Show me where it is, I’ve got to get at it.” We took a couple of torches, a pair of rubber gloves, and an iron poker and went down into the sub-basement. We should have taken gas masks too. He threw open the doors of the big oven-like thing and I ducked my coat and started to crawl in head-first.

“You can’t go in there!” he cried aghast. “They’re still using the chutes at this hour, you’ll get garbage all over you.”

“How the hell else am I going to get at it?” I yelled back over my shoulder. “Which of these openings is fed by the C-apartments?”

“The furthest one over.”

“It would be! You go up and give orders no one in the building is to empty any more garbage until I can get out of here.”

I don’t ever want a job like that again. Pawing around among the remains of people’s suppers is the last word in nastiness. Slippery potato peels got in my shoes and fishbones pricked my fingers. Holding my breath didn’t help much. I was in there over half an hour. When I was through I came out backwards an inch at a time and took a good sneeze, but what I came out with was worth it. I had two fistfuls of human hair, blond hair cut off short at the scalp. Cut off in a hurry, because one of the hairpins that had dressed it was still tangled in it. It hadn’t come from the dead woman’s head; there was no blood on it. The hairpin was amber, mate to the one I’d found upstairs. I also had the crumpled lid of a cardboard box that said Sylvia, Hairdresser on it. It looked like a hatbox but it wasn’t, hairdressers don’t sell hats. I didn’t really need it, I had a general idea of what was what now, but as the saying goes, every little bit added to what you’ve got makes a little bit more.

Upstairs I hung my duds out on the fire-escape to air and put on clean ones. Then I beat it over to headquarters to talk some more to Fraser. I found him in the back room where a couple of the boys had been holding hands with him since he’d been brought in. I got the cold shoulder all around, to put it mildly. “Well, well,” said one of them, “look who’s here. Nice of you to drop in. Care to sign your name in the guest-book?”

“I remember now,” said the other. “Isn’t Galbraith the name? Weren’t you assigned to this case just tonight?”

“He wouldn’t know. It didn’t happen close enough to get him steamed up,” said the first one. “The corpse only just about landed in his—”

I stuck my hands deep in my pockets and grabbed hold of the lining. “What’s that paper you’ve got in your hand?” I cut in.

“Why, this is just the confession of Fraser here that he killed his wife, which he is now about to sign. Aren’t you, Fraser?”

Fraser nodded like a jack-in-the-box and his eyes seemed to roll around all over his head. “Anything, anything,” he gasped. They read it back to him and he almost tore it away from them, he was so anxious to sign and get it over with. I just stood by and took it all in. It didn’t amount to a hell of a whole lot. In fact it stacked up to exactly nothing. “Phooey!” I said. “You’ve got him punch-drunk, that’s all. Who the hell couldn’t get anything out of that nerve-wreck?”

His hand wobbled so that he could hardly put his name to it. They had to steady him by the elbow. “Now will you lemme alone, now will you lemme alone?” he kept murmuring over and over.

“Get wise,” I said as I followed them outside. “Why don’t you save yourselves a lot of razzing and tear that thing up before you show it to anybody?”

“Get that!” one of them laughed.

“Green with envy,” added the other.

“Look,” I said patiently, “let me show you. He didn’t have the key, couldn’t get in to do it even if he wanted to.”

“That’s what he tried to hand us, too.”

“I know it’s the truth because I found his key myself, found it on the living-room floor right in my own flat. The super had dumped him on the sofa, see, with his feet higher than his head.”

Did they laugh! They made more noise than a shooting-gallery. “Know where it had been all the time? In the cuff of his trouser. Dropped in when he was dressing this morning and stayed there all day long. It’s a natural, one of those crazy little things that do happen ever once in a while. That’s why I believe him. If it had disappeared altogether, I wouldn’t have. But who’d think of planting a key in his own trouser-cuff? If that ain’t enough for you dimwits, I checked up on where he worked, called his employer at his home, found out what time he left the office. He’d only just gotten to his door when I came up the stairs and found him standing outside of it.”