Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

“Spooky after they’re gone, isn’t it?” I muttered. “Still gets me, and I’ve been on about a hundred of them by now.”

He said, “Yes sir, Captain Endicott.” But he didn’t sound very definite about it.

The phone rang just as I got down to the bottom step, and I went to it alertly, but it wasn’t a private call. It was for me. Jordan, to tell me he had the two coal-heavers down at Headquarters.

“All right, keep them there,” I said, “I’ll be down shortly, I’m just winding up here.”

I went back into the kitchen again and scuffed the china-fragments around aimlessly. And then I kicked aside some dishes and uncovered a heel.

Looking at it reminded me of how Jenny’s had come off too; it only showed how insecure the average feminine heel was. It was a wonder they didn’t hurt themselves more often than they did.

The screen-door opened and Holmes came in with Mrs. Trinker just then, so I put it into my pocket for the time being and went out to talk to her.

“What’s happened?” she said in a sort of helpless, pleading voice. The harness-bull by the door loomed bigger than either Holmes or myself to her, the way a uniform usually does to a layman. “What’s this officer doing here? Has Paul done something?”

She was a nice wholesome-looking blonde, of the housewife type. Her voice was the nicest thing about her. Soft and soothing, the kind that, is seldom raised in anger. She was well-dressed and quite nice looking.

“I had to leave my sister sick in bed,” she said.

I hated this part of it that was coming next. “Sit down, won’t you?” I flicked my eyes at the staircase, and Holmes ran up it unnoticed to the bathroom to try to find a sedative in case she needed it. He knew what I meant by past experience.

“But where is he? This other man wouldn’t tell me anything coming down.”

I said, “Your husband’s been shot.”

“Bad?” She got white, not all in one flash, but slowly.

“He’s gone,” I said.

I don’t need to go into it after that. I could tell in about five minutes that I wouldn’t be able to question her any that night. A matron came up to take charge of her as soon as she was able to walk, and took her to a hotel in her custody. There was no need to lock the poor woman up in a cell for the night.

A new cop came up on special duty to keep an eye on the premises from outside, and I started to put the lights out and lock up, to go down to the house and work on what we had. We were about through up here for all present purposes. I was the last one in the place. Holmes had gone out to the car and was chewing the rag with the cop, while he waited for me.

The living-room switch was just inside the front door, and as I crossed toward it, my current cigar butt, which had grown too small to handle adequately, slipped out of my lips and dropped to the floor. I stooped down to get it, naturally, not wanting a fire to start after we’d left the place, and with my line of vision way down low like that, parallel to the floor, I saw this object under the sofa.

People had sat on that sofa all night long. Holmes, the cop. Mrs. Trinker, and their feet must have been just an inch or two away from it, but nobody had seen it. I thought it was just a crumpled piece of paper, or maybe even a ball of gray waste from a vacuum or carpet-sweeper, but I reached in and pulled it out.

It was a handkerchief; a woman’s handkerchief, pale-blue and so thin you could almost look through it. It had a little colored design of a kitten stitched on one corner. A faint hint of honeysuckle reached my nose, and when I raised it higher, it got stronger, and there was a whiff of something else; like it had been wrapped around a chocolate bar.

I had a tickling sensation in my memory of smelling, or looking at, or picking up, something just like this, somewhere before. But the rest of my mind was on the job and told me: “She dropped it, all right. It’s never Mrs. Trinker’s, I know that already.”

I started to stuff it into my pocket — until I could go out and show it to Holmes — and my knuckles brushed the heel that was already in there, and the lining of my throat suddenly contracted.

Did you ever get dizzy on your knees? I was on my knees there, upright in front of the sofa, and the four walls of the room suddenly shifted around me. The one opposite me went off to the side, then in back of me, then around to the other side, then they were all back where they started again. But meanwhile I had to reach out and steady myself against the edge of the sofa.

A clock was ticking somewhere in the house. Upstairs in the bedroom, I guess. I could hear it clearly in the stillness.

It had ticked hundreds and hundreds of times, when finally Holmes’ voice came in to me from the curb outside: “Coming, Cap? What’s holding you up?”

I was still there on my knees, supporting myself with one hand out against the edge of the sofa. I was afraid he’d come in and find me there. I took my hand out of my pocket where it had stayed all this time, and left the handkerchief in there with the heel.

It was a slow business, getting up. I am still only forty, but I knew what it felt like to be sixty. I planted one foot flat and hoisted myself on that, then I dragged the other one up after it, and I groaned with the effort. Or maybe it was a broken mainspring, inside me.

I said something. I heard a sound come out of me that said, “My little girl,” and I zig-zagged in the middle and almost went down again.

I dragged myself over to the light-switch and punched it out, and the kindly darkness came around me and hid me. I put the back of my hand against my eyes and held it there. Outside, from the quiet sidewalk, Holmes’ voice carried in to me clearly, though he was talking low now. “The guy’s as good as fried. Endicott never fumbled one of these things yet. He never misses,” he was saying to the new cop.

“What I like about him is, he’s so human with it, just like one of us,” the cop was saying.

Human was right, if human meant to hurt all over, to be scared all over, to be going under for the third time without a helping hand in sight.

It didn’t last very long. It couldn’t. I would have gone batty. But it had driven an awful dent in me, left me wide open. I said to myself: “Be a man. You’re nuts. It couldn’t be. It just looks that way now, but it’ll straighten itself out. You’ll see.” I fought it off that way.

Finally I moved out of the dark room into the pale wash of the street light filtering through the screen door. Holmes was coming toward me up the walk, to see what was taking me so long. He had the makings of a good dick. He could tell even by the pale street light. He said, “What’s the matter, Cap? You look funny.”

I said, “I had a dizzy spell in there just now. That ever happen to you? I bent down too far to pick up my cigar.”

He said, “You want to take it easy, Cap. We can always get you a new cigar, we can’t always get a new Cap.”

I gave the cop his instructions, and we got in the car and drove down to the house. The death-watch tried to gang up on me in the ante-room, but I brushed through them. “Not now, boys. May have something for you in the morning. Query me then.”

One of them called after me, “Our papers can’t wait till the morning, give us a hand-out at least—”

Holmes showed his teeth, said: “You heard the captain, didn’t you?”

I sat down behind my desk and called Ballistics. Kelcey came on, and I said: “Did you get the pill out of him yet? What sweat-band does it take?”

“We’re giving it the screen-test now. Thirty-eight around the waist,” he said.

The same caliber as our police positives.

There was a strained pause. But why should there be a hitch in a call like this, when we both ought to know what we wanted to say? He was waiting for me to give him further instructions, I guess. I didn’t. Then he said, “Oh, by the way, Ed, I’m still waiting for that gun of yours you asked me to have cleaned and oiled for you.”