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

“You don’t believe what you’ve been reading about me?”

“Not if you tell me not to.”

“It was just a routine questioning. I used to know the girl a long time ago, and they grabbed at every straw that came their way.”

“We’ll have to change everything — go off quietly by ourselves. But I don’t care.”

“I’ve got to see you. Shall I come up there?”

“No,” she said tearfully. “Not yet. You’d better wait a while first. Give them a little more time.”

“But then how am I going to—?”

“I’ll dress and come out and meet you somewhere.”

“Can you make it?”

“I’m getting better every minute. Just hearing your voice, hearing you say that it was not true — that’s better than all their tranquilizers.”

“There’s a quiet little cocktail lounge called ‘For Lovers Only.’ Not noisy, not jammed. The end booth.”

Her voice was getting stronger. “We were there once, remember?”

“Wear the same dress you did that night.”

It was on all over again. “Hurry, I’m waiting for your hello-kiss.”

He pulled his shirt off so exuberantly that he split the sleeve halfway down. He didn’t care. He shook the shave-cream bomb until it nearly exploded in his hand. He went back to the phone and called a florist.

“I want an orchid sent somewhere — end booth — she’ll be wearing pale yellow. I didn’t ask you that, but what does come after the fifteen-dollar one? Then make it two fifteen-dollar ones. And on the card you just say this — ‘From a fellow to his girl.’ ”

And because he was young and in love — completely, sincerely in love, even though he’d killed someone who had once loved him the same way — he started, in his high spirits, in his release from long-sustained tension, to do a mimic Indian war dance, prancing around the room, now reared up high, now bent down low, drumming his hand against his mouth. “O-wah-o-wah!”

I beat it! he told himself, I’ve got it made. Just take it easy from here in, just talk with a small mouth — and I’m the one in a thousand who beat it!

Then someone knocked quietly on his door.

Less than an hour after going to bed, one of the detectives stirred and finally sat up again.

His wife heard him groping for his shoes to put them back on. “What’s the matter?” she asked sleepily. “You want a drink of water?”

“No,” he said. “I want a drop of blood.”

If you couldn’t find a drop of blood in the daytime how are you going to find it at night?”

He didn’t answer; he just went ahead pulling his pants on.

“Oh, God,” the poor woman moaned, “Why did I ever many a detective?”

“Oh, God,” he groaned back from the direction of the door, “what makes you think you have?”

“O-wah-o-wah!”

Someone knocked quietly on his door.

He went over to it, and it was one of them again.

He looked at the intruder ruefully — confidently but ruefully. “What, again?” he sighed.

“This time it’s for real.”

“What was it all the other times, a rehearsal without costumes?”

“Hard to convince, aren’t you? All right, I’ll make it official,” the detective said obligingly, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Corinne Matthews. Anything-you-say-may-be-held-against-you-kindly-come-with-me.”

“You did that like a professional,” he smirked, still confident.

The detective had brought a car with him. They got in it

“This is going to blow right up in your face. You know that, don’t you? I’ll sue for false arrest — I’ll sue the city for a million.”

“All right, I’ll show you.”

They drove to the bungalow that had been Corinne Matthews, and parked. They got out and went in together. They had to go through the doorway on the bias. The detective had him on handcuffs now — he wasn’t taking any chances.

The detective left it dark. He took out his flashlight and made a big dazzling cartwheel of light by holding it nozzle-close against one section of the wall.

“Take a good look,” he said.

“Why don’t you put the lights on?”

“Take a good look this way first.”

Just a newly painted, spotless wall, and at one side the light switch, tripped to OFF.

“Now look at it this way.”

He killed the flashlight, snapped up the wall switch, and the room lit up. Still just a newly painted, spotless wall, and at one side the light switch, reversed now to ON.

And on it a small blob of blood.

“That’s what I needed. And look, that’s what I got.”

The accused sat down, the accuser at the other end of the handcuffs, standing, his arm at elbow height

“How can a guy win?” the murderer whispered.

“You killed her at night, when the lights were on, when the switch was up like this, showing ON. You came back and painted in the daylight hours, when the lights were not on, when the switch was down, showing OFF. We cased this room a hundred times, for a hundred hours — but always in the daytime too, when the lights were not on, when the switch was down, showing OFF. And on the part of the switch that never showed in the daytime , the part marked ON, the way it is now, there was one drop of blood that we never found — until tonight.”

The murderer was quiet for a minute, then he said the final words — no good to hold them back any more. “Sure,” he said, “it was like that. That’s what it was like.”

His head went over, and a great huff of hot breath came surging out of him, rippling down his necktie, like the vital force, the will to resist, emptying itself.

The end of another story.

The end of another life.

Bettina (“Betts,” as he called her) had just finished rinsing out a pair of stockings in the hotel-bathroom, when Joe came in with the men he had rounded up for the game. It had taken him a little longer to connect tonight; he had been gone the better part of an hour.

“Fellows,” he said in that amiable, ingratiating voice he put on at such times, “this is the wife. Betts, this is Mr. Wallace. And this is Mr. Meany. And this here is — what’d you say it was again?”

“Roebeck,” answered the man whose name had been forgotten.

Mr. Wallace looked her over not too impersonally. “That’s a good name for a poker-player’s wife,” he said.

She laughed. She’d heard that before.

She wondered idly whether any of them had given their own right names. It didn’t matter too much what name you went under in a poker game among strangers, she supposed; what mattered was what kind of luck you had.

They found out they were short a chair. The only remaining one in the room was a ponderous overstuffed affair off in a corner, far too bulky to bring in close enough to the table to give its occupant comfortable access to the clockwise flow of the game. And besides, that would have left Joe’s wife with nowhere to sit except the edge of the radiator, which was deeply ridged and would have been insupportable for any length of time.

Wallace tame to the rescue. “I’ll go get one from my room,” he said. “I’m right on this same floor you are, just around the turn of the hall. Nine-twelve.”

Joe was genuinely surprised by the coincidence, she could tell. He probably wouldn’t have had to spend so much time approaching him if he had known about it.

“Let’s get down to business,” Roebeck remarked surlily, when Wallace had come back with the chair.

They seated themselves. Joe took out a new deck of cards and broke the seal. He was never, she reflected, without a new deck of cards. He might be without a penny in his pockets, without a roof over his head; without a shave, without a haircut, without a tooth-brush, without a watch (and she had known him to be without each of those things at one time or another), but he was never, he was never , without a fresh, unopened — and therefore patently unmarked — deck of cards somewhere near at hand.