Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

She found him in a place that the men in his division called “The Greek’s,” a lunch-counter just around the corner from the precinct house to which he was attached. He was at the far end of the counter, sitting slumped over a mug of coffee. She sidled up alongside him without his seeing her and sat down next to him.

“I guess you forgot what time our date was for.”

“No,” he said glumly. “No, I didn’t. But what’s the use? I guess you better quit seeing me. I’m just a dick on the Homicide Squad. That’s all I’ll ever be, I guess. And you’re...”

“I’m what?”

“You’re a rich girl, a debutante — that kind of thing. We don’t belong together, Ginny. If I hadn’t stopped your horse from running away with you that day in the park, we would never even have met. And maybe it would have been better for both of us.”

She smiled understandingly, as though this wasn’t the first time she’d heard him talk that way. “What is it this time, Terry?” she asked. “What went wrong?”

“They call him The Rose Killer,” he said moodily. “And he’s got to be stopped. There’s a general demotion coming on if he isn’t — all along the line from top to bottom. We were told that just now. And it was no kidding. That’s all I need vet — to go back into uniform. I’d look great then, going around with a girl like you, wouldn’t I?”

“I’m not complaining,” she said softly. “I’ve got your handcuffs on, and the key was thrown away a long time ago. What are you going to do with your prisoner?”

“Turn her loose.”

“She refuses to be freed.” She waited a moment, finally put her hand on his sleeve. “Then why don’t you get him, Terry, if that would make it easier for the two of us?”

He gave her a look. “Nice work if you can get it,” he said caustically.

“What’s he like?”

“That’s the stumble. He could be anybody. Nobody’s seen him — only the dead — and they don’t talk about it afterward. He just slips out of the shadows, kills, and then slips back again. We’re no further than we were in the beginning.”

She gulped a sip of coffee, as if to warm herself. “How many times?” she asked fearfully.

He held up four fingers. “And he’s not through yet. It’s going to be one of these chain things, if he’s allowed to keep on.”

“Are you sure it was always him? Couldn’t it have been somebody else one of those times?”

He shook his head. “That part of it we’re sure of. There’s the same touch every time. You know what that is, don’t you?”

“You explained it to me once. What is it this time?”

“I shouldn’t be telling you stuff like this. You should be dancing at some party — not listening to things like this.”

“Anything that concerns you concerns me. I want to know.”

“It’s always the same — a rose. A white rosebud. A death rose. He puts it into each one’s hand before he leaves her lying there. We’ve found each one like that.”

“Her?” she breathed.

“It’s always a woman. A young woman of a certain age. Between nineteen and twenty-three. Never any younger, never any older.”

“What is it? What makes him...?”

“I’ve been reading up in a book of abnormal psychology. It was part of the instructions we were given — not that it’s helped much in tracking him down. But it has helped to clear the fog away from the motive. This is just deduction, pure and simple, but here’s what I get out of it. You know what the rose is, don’t you, speaking symbolically? The flower of love. It’s always stood for that. So there’s a shell-shocked love involved. Now the white rose — the bud — has an additional meaning of its own — purity, loyalty, devotion — and especially it stands for a young girl — for youth. So the factor involved here is a doublecross, committed against him by someone young, whom he worshipped, and who betrayed his faith in her.

“Now, the second point is this: It has always happened either during or immediately after a blackout. We all mistakenly thought at first that the great opportunity offered by the darkness and the emptiness of the streets had something to do with it. Now we’ve decided that it hasn’t. At least one of those crimes occurred a full hour after the lights had gone on again and everything had returned to normal. The victim had been seen alive and had been spoken to by numerous people well after the all-clear had sounded. It wasn’t until more than sixty-five minutes later that he struck.”

“Then?”

“I’m frightening you.”

“This is our problem — not yours.”

“Here, have a detective’s cheap brand of cigarette to steady you.”

She took an impatient puff. “Then it isn’t the darkness of the blackout?”

“No, it isn’t the darkness of the blackout itself. Here’s how it stacks up now. The original act of betrayal occurred during a blackout. Now, we haven’t had many of them over here yet, so that probably means London. They were continuous there — night after night — and the tension was terrific. Everyone’s nerves stretched to the breaking point. All that anybody, who already had any latent mental instability, needed was an extra push to go off the deep end altogether. One night some one man in London did, and that’s the same man that’s over here now, doing this.

“Maybe he came home stunned one night, from a bomb-concussion, or with his equilibrium teetering after being dug out from being buried alive. Maybe he came home to someone he adored, someone whom he thought was loyal and true to him, and caught her doublecrossing him — getting ready to run off with someone else, under the impression that he’d never turn up alive again. Maybe he even discovered some plot under way, engineered by her, to kill him if he should come back, and then collect his insurance. The result is the thing — what it did to him. It gave him that final push over into the darkness. It was a shock on top of a shock. One shock too many.

“Whether there was an original crime, at that time, has never come to light. We don’t know. Probably there was, but if so, that’s on the doorstep of Scotland Yard. All that we’re concerned with is that he’s shown up over here. And four times, during our own blackouts, the original crime has repeated itself.”

“But if, in London, he once...”

“The mind remembers. Now every time the sirens wail and the lights go down, he lives that first time over again. The shock occurs again. His sanity overbalances again. He finds her, somewhere, somehow; and he kills her all over again. And then he puts a white rose in her hand. But the body find is that of some innocent girl who was a total stranger to him — who never knew him — who never did him any harm — who only had the misfortune of looking a little like that first one, over in London.”

She hunched her shoulders a little. Her teeth were lightly tapping together, like typewriter keys, but she was careful not to let him notice. “And how does he — is it always the same?”

“Always. Strangulation between the hands, with a thumb into the windpipe to keep them from crying out. They die in swift and sudden silence. And it must have been that way the first time too.”

“Isn’t there anything about him you know? At least, you do know he’s English?”

“No,” he said, “not even that. Hundreds of Americans have been living in London all during the war. Or for that matter, he could be any other nationality. It’s just that it was probably there that it happened.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging his hat a little.

“And here’s what’s so hopeless about it — what’s so dangerous about him. He’s insane, of course, but there’s only this one phase to his insanity. You probably think of him as some twisted, snarling, hunched-over thing, someone out of a Boris Karloff picture, prowling along glary-eyed, with his hands curved, so that you can spot him coming from a block away. He isn’t — or we would have caught him long ago. He’s probably perfectly normal in appearance and behavior. Maybe even clean-cut and rather likable looking. You could pass him on the street and never know. You could be around him for days at a time and never be any the wiser, never catch on that there was anything the matter with him. I bet many a time he’s brushed elbows with our own fellows, coming and going, and they never gave him a second look. But when the sirens hoot and the corner lamp-posts go out, the scene comes back to him. Then he sees someone vaguely like her in the dimness around him — or right afterward when the lights go on again. And that one defective wire in him is jangled and — pfft! — a short circuit!”