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

There’s silence in the room — for just a minute — a silence you could cut with a knife. Then he speaks again, in agony. “I tell you I’ve killed a man! Don’t stand looking at me like that! I’ve k—!”

The sergeant speaks, gently, sympathetically. “What’s the matter, Mr. Bloch, been working too hard?” The sergeant comes out from behind the desk. “Come on inside with as. You stay here, Latour, and take the phone.”

And when they’ve taken him into the back room: “Get him a chair, Humphries. Here, drink some of this water, Mr. Bloch. Now what’s it all about?” The sergeant has brought the gun in with him. He passes it before his nose, then cracks it open. He looks at the detective. “He’s used it all right.”

“Was it an accident, Mr. Bloch?” the detective prompts respectfully. The man in the chair shakes his head. He’s started to shiver all over, although the New Orleans night outside is warm and mellow. “Who’d you do it to? Who was it?” the sergeant puts in.

“I don’t know his name,” Bloch mumbles. “I never have. They call him Papa Benjamin.”

His two interrogators exchange a puzzled look, “Sounds like—” The detective doesn’t finish it. Instead he turns to the seated figure and asks almost perfunctorily: “He was a white man, of course, wasn’t he?”

“He was colored,” is the unexpected answer.

The thing gets more crazy, more inexplicable, at every turn. How should a man like Eddie Bloch, one of the country’s ace bandsmen, pulling down his two-and-a-half grand every week for playing at the Bataclan, come to kill a nameless colored man — then be pulled all to pieces by it? These two men in their time have never seen anything like it; they have put suspects through forty-eight-hour grillings and yet compared to him now, those suspects were fresh as daisies when they got through with them.

He has said it was no accident and he has said it was no hold-up. They shower him with questions, not to break him down but rather to try and pull him together. “What’d he do, talk out of turn to you? Forget himself? Get wise?” This is the Southland, remember.

The man’s head goes from side to side like a pendulum.

“Did you go out of your head for a minute? Is that how it was?” Again a nodded no.

The man’s condition has suggested one angle to the detective’s mind. He looks around to make sure the patrolman outside isn’t listening. Then very discreetly: “Are you a needle-user, Mr. Bloch? Was he your source?”

The man looks up at them. “I’ve never touched a thing I shouldn’t. A doctor will tell you that in a minute.”

“Did he have something on you? Was it blackmail?”

Bloch fumbles some more in his clothes; again they dance around on his skeletonized frame. Suddenly he takes out a cube of money, as thick as it is wide, more money than these two men have ever seen before in their lives. “There’s three thousand dollars there,” he says simply, and tosses it down like he did the gun. “I took it with me tonight, tried to give it to him. He could have had twice as much, three times as much, if he’d said the word, if he’d only let up on me. He wouldn’t take it. That was when I had to kill him. That was all there was left for me to do.”

“What was he doing to you?” They both say it together.

“He was killing me.” He holds out his arm and shoots his cuff. The wristbone is about the size of the sergeant’s own thumb-joint. The expensive platinum wrist-watch that encircles it has been pulled in to the last possible notch and yet it still hangs almost like a bracelet. “See? I’m down to 102. When my shirt’s off, my heart’s so close to the surface you can see the skin right over it move like a pulse with each beat.”

They draw back a little, almost they wish he hadn’t come in here. That he had headed for some other precinct instead. From the very beginning they have sensed something here that is over their heads, that isn’t to be found in any of the instruction-books. Now they come out with it. “How?” Humphries asks. “How was he killing you?”

There’s a flare of torment from the man. “Don’t you suppose I would have told you long ago, if I could? Don’t you suppose I would have come in here weeks ago, months ago, and demanded protection, asked to be saved — if I could have told you what it was? If you would have believed me?”

“We’ll believe you, Mr. Bloch,” the sergeant says soothingly. “We’ll believe anything. Just tell us—”

But Bloch in turn shoots a question at them, for the first time since he has come in. “Answer me! Do you believe in anything you can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch-?”

“Radio,” the sergeant suggests not very brightly, but Humphries answers more frankly: “No.”

The man slumps down again in his chair, shrugs apathetically. “If you don’t, how can I expect you to believe me? I’ve been to the biggest doctors, biggest scientists in the world. They wouldn’t believe me. How can I expect you to? You’ll simply say I’m cracked, and let it go at that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in an asylum—” He breaks off and sobs. “And yet it’s true, it’s true!”

They’ve gotten into such a maze that Humphries decides it’s about time to snap out of it. He asks the one simple question that should have been asked long ago, and the hell with all this mumbo-jumbo. “Are you sure you killed him?” The man is broken physically and he’s about ready to crack mentally too. The whole thing may be an hallucination.

“I know I did. I’m sure of it,” the man answers calmly. “I’m already beginning to feel a little better. I felt it the minute he was gone.” If he is, he doesn’t show it. The sergeant catches Humphries’ eye and meaningfully taps his forehead in a sly gesture.

“Suppose you take us there and show us,” Humphries suggests. “Can you do that? Where’d it happen, at the Bataclan?”

“I told you he was colored,” Bloch answers reproachfully. Bataclan is tony. “It was in the Vieux Carr6. I can show you where, but I can’t drive any more. It was all I could do to get down here with my car.”

“I’ll put Desjardins on it with you,” the sergeant says, and calls through the door to the patrolman: “Ring Dij and tell him to meet Humphries at corner of Canal and Royal right away!” He turns and looks at the huddle on the chair. “Buy him a bracer on the way. It don’t look like he’ll last till he gets there.”

The man flushes a little — it would be a blush if he had any blood left in him. “I can’t touch alcohol any more. I’m on my last legs. It goes right through me like—” He hangs his head, then raises it again.

“But I’ll get better now, little by little, now that he’s—”

The sergeant takes Humphries out of earshot. “Pushover for a padded cell. If it’s on the up-and-up, and not just a pipe dream, call me right back. I’ll get the commissioner on the wire.”

“At this hour of the night?”

The sergeant motions toward the chair with his head. “He’s Eddie Bloch, isn’t he?”

Humphries takes him under the elbow, pries him up from the chair. Not roughly, but just briskly, energetically. Now that things are at last getting under way, he knows where he’s at; he can handle them. He’ll still be considerate, but he’s business-like now; he’s into his routine. “All right, come on, Mr. Bloch, let’s get up there.”

“Not a scratch goes down on the blotter until I’m sure what I’m doing,” the sergeant calls after Humphries. “I don’t want this whole town down on my neck tomorrow morning.”

Humphries almost has to hold him up on the way out and into the car. “This it?” he says. “Wow!” He just touches it with his nail and they’re off like velvet. “How’d you ever get this into the Vieux Carr6 without knocking over the houses?”