Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

“Wednesday before last,” said the man. “Won’t be back for a month or two.”

“Could you give me her address in Nebraska?” Mrs. Kelly asked. “I could drop her a note,” she explained.

The man hesitated. “Don’t have it right handy,” he said, finally. Then, all at once, he said, “Who’d you say this was?”

For a frantic second, Mrs. Kelly couldn’t remember what name she had given, and then it came back to her. “Annie Tyrrell,” she said.

“I don’t think I know you,” said the man suspiciously. “Where you know my wife from?”

“Oh, we — uh — we met in the supermarket.”

“Is that right?” he sounded more suspicious than ever. “I tell you what,” he said. “You give me your number. I don’t have the wife’s address right handy, but I can look it up and call you back.”

“Well, uh—” Mrs. Kelly thought frantically. She didn’t know what to do. If she gave him her own number, he might be able to check it and find out who she really was. But if she gave him some other number, he might call back and find out there wasn’t any Annie Tyrrell, and then he’d know for sure that someone suspected him.

He broke into her thoughts, saying “Say, who is this, anyway? What’s my wife’s first name?”

“What?”

“I asked you what’s my wife’s first name,” he repeated.

“Well,” she said, forcing a little laugh that sounded patently false even to her, “whatever on earth for? Don’t you even know your own wife’s first name?”

“ I do,” he said. “But do you?”

Suddenly terrified, Mrs. Kelly hung up without another word, and sat staring at the telephone. It had been him! The sound of his voice, the suspicious way he had acted. It had been him! She looked at his name on her list. Andrew Shaw, apartment 8B, two floors up, directly over her apartment.

Andrew Shaw. He was the killer, and now he knew that someone suspected him. It wouldn’t take him long to realize the call had come from someone in this building, someone who must have seen the evidence in the incinerator shaft.

He would be searching for her now, and she didn’t know how long it would take him to find her. He might be much more resourceful than she; it might not take him as long as a week to find and silence the person who was threatening him.

Pride was pride, but foolishness was something else again. It was time to call Detective Ryan. She had the murderer’s name for him now, and the head of the murdered woman hadn’t yet been disposed of. It was time for Detective Sean Ryan to take over.

Thoroughly frightened, Mrs. Kelly fumbled through the phone book until she found the police station number, and had it half-dialed when she remembered it was Sunday. Of course, some policemen were at work on Sundays, but not necessarily Sean Ryan. Well, if he wasn’t working today, some other policeman would have to do. Though she did hope it would be Sean Ryan. Simply to see the expression on his face when he saw she’d been right all along, of course.

When the bored voice said, “Sixteenth Precinct,” Mrs. Kelly said, “I’d like to speak to Detective Ryan, please. Detective Sean Ryan.”

“Just one moment, please,” said the voice. Mrs. Kelly waited for a moment that seemed to go on forever, and then the same voice came back and said, “He’s off to eleven o’clock Mass now, ma’am. Be back in about an hour. Want to leave a message?”

She knew she should settle for another policeman, that this was no time for delays, but she found herself saying, “Would you ask him to call Mrs. Aileen Kelly, please? The number is CIrcle 5-9970.”

She had to spell her first name for him, and added, “Would you tell him it’s important, and to call right away, the minute he gets there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you very much.”

And then she had nothing to do but wait. And wait. And look at the ceiling.

He didn’t call till two-thirty, and by then Mrs. Kelly was frantic. In the first place, she was afraid her phone call to Mister Andrew Shaw might have him worried about maintaining his four o’clock schedule. He might decide to get rid of the head at three o’clock, when the incinerator first went on, and then there wouldn’t be any more evidence. And in the second place she was terrified that he would find her right away, that any moment he would be knocking on the front door.

Half a dozen times, she almost called the police again, but every time she told herself that he must call in a minute or two. And when he finally did call, at two-thirty, he stepped directly into a tongue-lashing.

“You were supposed to call me directly after you got back to the precinct house,” she told him. “Directly after Mass.”

“Mrs. Kelly, I’m a busy man,” he said defensively. “I’ve just this minute got back to the station. I had some other calls to make.”

“Well, you hotfoot it over here this instant. Mister Detective Ryan,” she snapped. “I’ve got your murderer for you, but with all your shilly-shallying around, he’s liable to get off scot-free yet. They turn the incinerator on at three o’clock, you know.”

“It’s this business about the arm again, is it?”

“It’s about the whole body this time,” she informed him. “And there’s nothing left of it but the head. Now, you get over here before even that is gone.”

She heard him sigh, and then he said, “Right, Mrs. Kelly. I’ll be right over.”

It was then twenty to three. In twenty minutes, the incinerator would go on. She was positive by now that he would change his pattern, that he would get rid of the head just as soon as ever he could. And that would be in twenty minutes.

And then it was fifteen minutes, and ten minutes and five minutes, and still Ryan didn’t come, though the precinct house was only a block and a half away, up on 47th Street.

At two minutes to three, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She peered out the peekhole at the hall, and saw that it was empty. Carefully and silently, she unlocked the door and crept down the hall to the incinerator. She opened it and stood staring in at the gray brick walls of the shaft, expecting any second to see the head go sailing by.

And still Ryan didn’t come.

At three o’clock on the dot, she heard a thump from above, and knew it was the head. Without stopping to think, she thrust her arm into the shaft in a frantic attempt to grab it and save it for evidence. With her arm stretched out like that, she couldn’t see into the shaft, but she felt the head when it landed on her wrist a second later. It was freezing cold, so he’d been keeping it in a home freezer all this time, and it was held by her wrist and a wall of the incinerator.

It was also sticky, and Mrs. Kelly’s imagination suddenly gave her a vivid image of exactly what she was touching. She gave a shriek, pulled her arm back, and the head went bumping down the shaft to the fire far below.

At that moment, the elevator door slid open and Detective Ryan appeared.

She glared at him for a speechless second, then shook her fist in fury. “Now you come, do you? Now, when it’s too late and the poor woman’s head is burned to a crisp and that Andrew Shaw is free as a bird, now you come!”

He stared at her in amazement, and she shook her fist at him. “The last of the evidence,” she cried, “Gone, burned to a crisp, because of—”

For the first time, she noticed the fist she was shaking. It was red, ribboned red, and as she looked, the cold ribbon spread down her arm, and she knew it was the poor woman’s blood.

“There’s your evidence!” she cried, raising her hand to him, and fell over in a faint.

When she awoke, on the sofa in her living room. Detective Ryan was sitting awkwardly on a kitchen chair beside her. “Are you all right now?” he asked her.