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

He made a mouth like that guy in the hair-tonic ads. “Gaston de la Rue,” he gargled.

I flashed my identification at him and he nearly jumped out of his skin and forgot about being French. “Break down,” I said, “I’m not one of your customers. Nobody on two legs ever had a name like that. Was it Drew or wasn’t it?”

“Sh, not so loud,” he said, “very bad for business. They like ’em French. This is just between us. Please keep it to yourself. Well yes, in private life I think he was called Gus Drew or something like that. But what an artist, he could have put a permanent-wave in a porcupine—”

“Let me see your appointment book for the past few weeks.” He took me back in his office and showed it to me. Mrs. Fraser’s name was down there three times in one month, and right next to it each time were “de la Rue’s” initials. “Why’d she always get him?” I wanted to know.

He shrugged. “She always asked for him. Some of them, they like to flirt a little.”

“Flirt with death,” I growled to myself. “Is he due back here for anything?” I asked him.

“He’s got a week’s pay coming to him, but when he called up and I asked him about it he said he wasn’t coming in for it. He told me to mail it to where he lives.”

“And did you? When?”

“Last night at closing time.”

It was just about being delivered. “Quick,” I said. “Got his last address on record? Fork it over.”

He gave it to me, then made a crack that nearly killed me. “Why ‘last,’ did he move?”

“Oh no, he’ll probably wave to me from the window.”

He followed me back to the front of the place again, sort of worried. “What’s he done?” he said. “What do they want him for?”

“The chief would like to have his mustache curled,” I answered and walked out.

I took a taxi and rode right up to the door of the address Mr. “Sylvia” had given me. I didn’t expect him to be there any more and he wasn’t. “Just moved out yesterday,” the janitor said. “Didn’t say where. Nice quiet fellow, too.”

“Where’s that letter you’re holding for him?” I said. “Did it come yet?”

“Just now. He said he’d be back for it.” His mouth opened. “How’d you know?”

“This is who I am,” I said. “Now get this. I can’t be hanging around the hallway. He mayn’t show up for days. I’ll take one of your rooms. You give him his letter when he asks for it, but watch yourself, keep a straight face on you. Then ring my bell three times, like this, see? Don’t let him see you do it, but don’t wait too long either — do it as soon as he turns his back on you. Now have you got that straight? God help you if you muff it.”

“Golly, ain’t this exciting!” he said. He showed me a sliver of a hall room at the back of the ground floor, with exactly three things in it — a bed, a light-bulb, and a window. I paid him a dollar apiece for them and after that I lived there. I tested the doorbell battery by staying where I was and having the janitor ring it for me from the vestibule. It was no cathedral chime but at least you could hear it, which was all that interested me.

They say you should be able to see the two sides to any story. Sitting here like that, waiting, with the walls pressing me in at the elbows, I saw as much of Drew’s side of it as I was ever likely to. No wonder ten grand had seemed a lot of money, no wonder murder hadn’t stopped him, if it meant getting out of a hole like this. Not that

I felt sorry for him, I just understood a little better than before. But there was one good angle to it. The ten grand wouldn’t be his for a long time yet, not for months. Meanwhile he needed what was in that envelope the janitor had, needed the little that was coming to him from “Sylvia’s,” needed it bad. He’d be around for it. I couldn’t lose.

Once in awhile I’d hear a step on the stairs, the old wooden stairs that seemed to go right up over my room, when somebody in the house came up or went down them. Once some woman hollered down from the top floor for her kid to come up. That was all. Silence the rest of the time. The minutes went like hours and the hours like weeks. I didn’t even smoke; there wasn’t room enough for two kinds of air in the place. I just sat, until I had a headache.

It came a little before eight, sooner than I’d expected. He must have needed it bad to come that quickly, or maybe he thought it was safer to get it over with right away than to wait a few days. He’d probably read in the papers by now that Fraser was taking the rap, anyway. And once he had this letter in his pocket and had walked around the corner, try to locate him again, just try.

Ding-ding-ding peeped the bell battery, and the air in the room got all churned up. I hauled the door out of the way and loped down the dim hallway. The janitor was standing just inside the street door waving his arm to me like a windmill. “He just went away,” he said. “There he goes, see him?” His cheap khaki waterproof was a pushover to tail.

“Get back!” I snarled and gave him a shove. “He’s liable to turn around.” I waited a second to get set, then I mooched out of the house, took a squint at the sky, turned my coat-collar up and started down the street in the same direction. He did look back from the corner just before he turned, but I’d finished crossing to the opposite side and was out of his line of vision.

I gave him a lot of rope for the first two blocks, then I saw a subway entrance heading toward us and I closed up on him in a hurry. He went into it like I’d been afraid he would. It’s about the best way of shaking anyone off there is, but he had to change a dime or something, and when I got down the steps myself he’d only just gone through the turnstile. There was a train already in, with its doors wide open and jammed to the roof. He took it on the run along with a lot of others and wedged himself in on the nearest platform just as the doors started to slip closed. There was just room enough left to get my fingernails in by the time I got there, but that was all the leverage I needed. They were the pneumatic kind. Back they went and I was standing on his feet and we were breathing into each other’s faces. “Whew!” I thought to myself, and kept my eyes fixed on the back of a newspaper the fat man next to him was reading.

He squirmed and yanked at 110th and tugged himself free. When I got up to the street myself he was just going into an A.&P. store. I took a look in the door as I went past. He was standing at the counter waiting his turn. Evidently they hadn’t even had the price of groceries until he called for that money that was coming to him. I walked all the way to the next corner, then doubled back on the other side of the street and finally parked at a bus stop and stood there waiting. But the right bus for me never seemed to come along.

He was in there over ten minutes, and then when he came out his arms were still empty anyway. Meaning he’d ordered so much that he couldn’t carry it himself. So they were going to stock up for the next few weeks and lie low, were they? I just barely kept him in sight after this, only close enough to tell which building he’d hit, as I knew there would be a last look back before he ducked. He finally got where he was going, gave a couple of cagy peeks, one over each shoulder, and then it was over. He was in — in Dutch.

I sized it up from where I was, tying my shoelace on somebody’s railing. It was a President McKinley-model flat on the south side of 109th, crummy as they come, without even a service entrance. That meant the groceries would have to be delivered at the front door when they came around, which was a chance for a lot more than groceries to crash in. No lights showed up in any front windows after he’d gone in, so I figured they had a flat in the rear. I eased myself into the vestibule. Half of the mailboxes had no names in them, so they were no help. I hadn’t expected his to have any, but if the rest of them had I could have used a process of elimination. It was so third-class the street door didn’t even have a catch on it, you just opened it and walked in.