Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

Then the elevator started with a jerk, cracking Mrs. Kelly smartly across the nose, and purred down its shaft, stopping at the fourth floor. Someone else had called it.

Furious, Mrs. Kelly glared at the overcoat-bundled man who stepped aboard at the fourth floor and pushed the button marked 1 .

On the first floor, the overcoated man left the building, while Mrs. Kelly dashed to the incinerator door, opened it, opened the ramp, and watched the left foot go falling by, to land in the midst of the flames below.

That did it for fair. There were only three days left now, and four floors to check. And if she didn’t find out who the murderer was before Sunday, he would have disposed of the body completely, and there wouldn’t be a shred of proof. Mrs. Kelly stormed back to the elevator, thinking, “Three days and four floors. Three days and four floors.”

And the roof.

She stopped in her tracks. The roof. The top of the incinerator shaft was up there, covered only by a wire grating. It wouldn’t be hard to bend that grating back, and drop something down the shaft.

Which meant it didn’t have to be somebody in this building at all. It could be someone from almost anywhere on the block, coming across the roofs to drop the evidence as far from home as possible.

Well, there was a way to find out about that. It had snowed all day yesterday and last night, but it hadn’t snowed today. The flat roof would have a nice thick layer of snow on it. If anyone had come across it to the incinerator shaft, he would have had to leave tracks.

Getting into the elevator, she pushed the button for the tenth floor, and waited impatiently as the elevator rose to the top of the building. Then she mounted the flight of stairs to the roof door, unbent the wire twisted around the catch, and stepped out.

She had been in too much of a hurry to stop and dress properly for the outdoors. It was cold and windy up on the roof, and the snow was ankle-deep. Mrs. Kelly turned the collar of her housecoat up and held the lapels closed against her throat. Her old scuffy slippers were no protection against the snow.

She hurried off to the right, to the incinerator chimney, circled it, and found no footprints beyond her own.

So, she’d wasted her time, frozen half to death and ruined her slippers, and all for nothing.

No, not for nothing after all. Now she knew for sure the murderer was somewhere in this building.

Friday morning, Mrs. Kelly awoke with a snuffly head cold and a steadily increasing irritation. She was furious at Detective Ryan for making her do his work for him. She was enraged at the terrible creature upstairs, who’d started this whole thing in the first place. And she was exasperated with herself, for being such a complete failure.

She spent the day sipping tea liberally laced with lemon juice, and at four hobbled out to the incinerator to watch the upper half of the torso bump by. Then, snuffly and miserable, she went back to bed.

On Saturday, the cold was just as bad, and her irritation was worse. She sat and looked at her list of sixteen names, and searched desperately for a way to find out which one of them was a murderer.

Of course, she could simply call Detective Ryan and have him come over at four o’clock, to watch the piece of body fall down the incinerator shaft. She could do that, but she wouldn’t. When she called Detective Ryan, it would be because she had found the murderer.

Besides, he probably wouldn’t even come.

So she glared at the list of names. A silly thought occurred to her. She could look up the phone numbers of all these people, and say, “Excuse me, have you been dropping a body down the incinerator?”

Well, come to think of it, why not? It was a woman’s body, which probably meant it was somebody’s wife. With her husband the murderer. Most of the people in this building were middle-aged or better, couples whose children had grown up and gone their separate ways years ago. So far as she knew, there were no large families in the building at all.

It would have to be an apartment in which there were only two people. The murderer wouldn’t be able to hide the dead body from someone living in the same apartment.

So maybe the telephone would be useful after all. She could call each apartment. If a woman answered she would say she had a wrong number. If a man answered, she would ask for his wife. The apartment without a woman would be the logical suspect.

With a definite plan at last, she ignored her stuffed nose and sat down beside the telephone to look up the phone numbers of her sixteen suspects, and start her calls.

Two of the sixteen had no phone numbers listed. Well, if the other fourteen produced nothing certain, she would have to think of something else for those two. And she was suddenly convinced that she would be able to think of something when the time came, with no trouble at all. She was suddenly oozing with confidence.

She started phoning shortly after five. Eight of the fourteen answered, five times a woman’s voice and three times a man’s voice. Mrs. Kelly apologized to the women for calling a wrong number, and asked each man who answered, “Is the Missus at home, please?” Twice, the men answered, “Just a second,” and Mrs. Kelly had to apologize to the women who came on the line. The third time, the man said, “She’s out shopping right now. Could I take a message for her?”

“I’ll call back later,” said Mrs. Kelly quickly. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes, probably,” said the man.

She waited an hour before calling that number again, and she was so nervous she actually did dial a wrong number to begin with. Because this might be the end of the search. If the wife still wasn’t home—

She was. Mrs. Kelly, disappointed, made the eighth wrong-number apology, and crossed the eighth name off her list.

She tried the remaining six numbers later in the evening, and only once found someone at home. A woman. Mrs. Kelly crossed the ninth name off the list.

She tried the five remaining numbers shortly after ten that night, but none of them answered. Deciding to try again in the morning, she set the alarm for eight o’clock and went to bed, where she slept uneasily, dreaming of bodies falling from endless blackness.

The upper half of the torso had fallen on Friday.

Mrs. Kelly’s cold was worse again on Saturday. She forced herself to the telephone around noon, managed to lower the number of suspects from five to three, then gave up and went back to bed, rousing only to watch the left leg plummet by at four o’clock.

Only the head remained.

Sunday morning, the cold was gone. Not even a sniffle remained. Mrs. Kelly got up early, went to eight o’clock Mass, and hurried back home through the January cold and the slippery streets to have breakfast and make more phone calls.

There were three numbers left. One of them was answered, by a disgruntled man who said his wife was asleep, but the other two still didn’t respond. She tried again at eleven, and this time the disgruntled man turned her over to his wife. Two numbers left.

Her second call was answered by a man, and Mrs. Kelly said, “Hello. Is the Missus at home?”

“Who’s this?” snapped the man. His voice was suspicious and hoarse, and Mrs. Kelly felt the leaping of hope within her breast.

“This is Annie Tyrrell,” she said, giving the first name to come to her mind, which happened to have been her mother’s maiden name.

“The wife ain’t here,” said the man. There was a pause, and he added, “She’s gone out of town. Visiting her mother. Gone to Nebraska.”

“Oh, dear me,” said Mrs. Kelly, hoping she was doing a creditable job of acting. “How long ago did she leave?”