The Oxford Book of American Det (57 page)

“Somep’n or other Benedict Avenue.” He scratched his neck helpfully.

“I know that. Chase around the corner a minute and get me the exact number on it, will you?”

“Why you want to know that for?” he asked as he turned to go.

“None of your business,” I said with the good-natured firmness that is all that was necessary to take care of that once and for all. I called After him just as he was closing the door: “And while you’re about it, step into the entrance and see if you can tell from the mailboxes who has the fourth-floor rear. Don’t get me the wrong one now. And try not to let anyone catch you at it.”

He went out mumbling something that sounded like, “When a man ain’t got nothing to do but just sit all day, he sure can think up the blamest things—“ The door closed and I settled down to some good constructive thinking.

I said to myself: What are you really building up this monstrous supposition on? Let’s see what you’ve got. Only that there were several little things wrong with the mechanism, the chain-belt, of their recurrent daily habits over there. 1. The lights were on all night the first night. 2. He came in later than usual the second night. 3. He left his hat on. 4. She didn’t come out to greet him—she hasn’t appeared since the evening before the lights were on all night. 5. He took a drink after he finished packing her truck. But he took three stiff drinks the next morning, immediately after her trunk went out. 6. He was inwardly disturbed and worried, yet superimposed upon this was an unnatural external concern about the surrounding windows that was off-key. 7. He slept in the living room, didn’t go near the bedroom, during the night before the departure of the trunk.

Very well. If she had been ill that first night, and he had sent her away for her health, that automatically cancelled out points 1, 2, 3, 4. It left points 5 and 6 totally unimportant and unincriminating. But when it came up against 7, it hit a stumbling block.

If she went away immediately after being ill that first night, why didn’t he want to sleep in their bedroom last night? Sentiment? Hardly. Two perfectly good beds in one room, only a sofa or uncomfortable easy chair in the other. Why should he stay out of there if she was already gone? Just because he missed her, was lonely? A grown man doesn’t act that way. All right, then she was still in there.

Sam came back parenthetically at this point and said: “That house is Number 525

Benedict Avenue. The fourth-floor rear, it got the name of Mr. and Mrs. Lars Thorwald up.”

“Sh-h,” I silenced, and motioned him backhand out of my ken.

“First he want it, then he don’t,” he grumbled philosophically, and retired to his duties.

I went ahead digging at it. But if she was still in there, in that bedroom last night, then she couldn’t have gone away to the country, because I never saw her leave today. She could have left without my seeing her in the early hours of yesterday morning. I’d missed a few hours, been asleep. But this morning I had been up before he was himself, I only saw his head rear up from that sofa after I’d been at the window for some time.

To go at all she would have had to go yesterday morning. Then why had he left the bedroom shade down, left the mattresses undisturbed, until today? Above all, why had he stayed out of that room last night? That was evidence that she hadn’t gone, was still in there. Then today, immediately after the trunk had been dispatched, he went in, pulled up the shade, tossed over the mattresses, and showed that she hadn’t been in there. The thing was like a crazy spiral.

No, it wasn’t either.
Immediately after the trunk had been dispatched—

The trunk.

That did it.

I looked around to make sure the door was safely closed between Sam and me. My hand hovered uncertainly over the telephone dial a minute. Boyne, he’d be the one to tell about it. He was on Homicide. He had been, anyway, when I’d last seen him. I didn’t want to get a flock of strange dicks and cops into my hair. I didn’t want to be involved any more than I had to. Or at all, if possible.

They switched my call to the right place after a couple of wrong tries, and I got him finally.

“Look, Boyne? This is Hal Jeffries—“

“Well, where’ve you been the last sixty-two years?” he started to enthuse.

“We can take that up later. What I want you to do now is take down a name and address. Ready? Lars Thorwald. Five twenty-five Benedict Avenue. Fourth-floor rear.

Got it?”

“Fourth-floor rear. Got it. What’s it for?”

“Investigation. I’ve got a firm belief you’ll uncover a murder there if you start digging at it. Don’t call on me for anything more than that—just a conviction. There’s been a man and wife living there until now. Now there’s just the man. Her trunk went out early this morning. If you can find someone who saw her leave herself - “ Marshalled aloud like that and conveyed to somebody else, a lieutenant of detectives above all, it did sound flimsy, even to me. He said hesitantly, “Well, but—“ Then he accepted it as was. Because I was the source. I even left my window out of it completely. I could do that with him and get away with it because he’d known me years, he didn’t question my reliability. I didn’t want my room all cluttered up with dicks and cops taking turns nosing out of the window in this hot weather. Let them tackle it from the front.

“Well, we’ll see what we see,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted.” I hung up and sat back to watch and wait events. I had a grandstand seat. Or rather a grandstand seat in reverse. I could only see from behind the scenes, but not from the front. I couldn’t watch Boyne go to work. I could only see the results, when and if there were any.

Nothing happened for the next few hours. The police work that I knew must be going on was as invisible as police work should be. The figure in the fourth-floor windows over there remained in sight, alone and undisturbed. He didn’t go out. He was restless, roamed from room to room without staying in one place very long, but he stayed in.

Once I saw him eating again—sitting down this time—and once he shaved, and once he even tried to read the paper, but he didn’t stay with it long.

Little unseen wheels were in motion around him. Small and harmless as yet, preliminaries. If he knew, I wondered to myself, would he remain there quiescent like that, or would he try to bolt out and flee? That mightn’t depend so much upon his guilt as upon his sense of immunity, his feeling that he could outwit them. Of his guilt I myself was already convinced, or I wouldn’t have taken the step I had.

At three my phone rang. Boyne calling back. “Jeffries? Well, I don’t know. Can’t you give me a little more than just a bald statement like that?”

“Why?” I fenced. “Why do I have to?”

“I’ve had a man over there making inquiries. I’ve just had his report. The building superintendent and several of the neighbours all agree she left for the country, to try and regain her health, early yesterday morning.”

“Wait a minute. Did any of them see her leave, according to your man?”

“No.”

“Then all you’ve gotten is a second-hand version of an unsupported statement by him.

Not an eyewitness account.”

“He was met returning from the depot, after he’d bought her ticket and seen her off on the train.”

“That’s still an unsupported statement, once removed.”

“I’ve sent a man down there to the station to try and check with the ticket agent if possible. After all, he should have been fairly conspicuous at that early hour. And we’re keeping him under observation, of course, in the meantime, watching all his movements. The first chance we get we’re going to jump in and search the place.” I had a feeling that they wouldn’t find anything, even if they did.

“Don’t expect anything more from me. I’ve dropped it in your lap. I’ve given you all I have to give. A name, an address, and an opinion.”

“Yes, and I’ve always valued your opinion highly before now, Jeff—“

“But now you don’t, that it?”

“Not at all. The thing is, we haven’t turned up anything that seems to bear out your impression so far.”

“You haven’t gotten very far along, so far.”

He went back to his previous cliché. “Well, we’ll see what we see. Let you know later.”

Another hour or so went by, and sunset came on. I saw him start to get ready to go out, over there. He put on his hat, put his hand in his pocket and stood still looking at it for a minute. Counting change, I guess. It gave me a peculiar sense of suppressed excitement, knowing they were going to come in the minute he left. I thought grimly, as I saw him take a last look around: If you’ve got anything to hide, brother, now’s the time to hide it.

He left. A breath-holding interval of misleading emptiness descended on the flat. A three-alarm fire couldn’t have pulled my eyes off those windows. Suddenly the door by which he had just left parted slightly and two men insinuated themselves, one behind the other. There they were now. They closed it behind them, separated at once, and got busy. One took the bedroom, one the kitchen, and they started to work their way toward one another again from those extremes of the flat. They were thorough. I could see them going over everything from top to bottom. They took the living room together. One cased one side, the other man the other.

They’d already finished before the warning caught them. I could tell that by the way they straightened up and stood facing one another frustratedly for a minute. Then both their heads turned sharply, as at a tip-off by doorbell that he was coming back. They got out fast.

I wasn’t unduly disheartened, I’d expected that. My own feeling all along had been that they wouldn’t find anything incriminating around. The trunk had gone.

He came in with a mountainous brown-paper bag sitting in the curve of one arm. I watched him closely to see if he’d discover that someone had been there in his absence.

Apparently he didn’t. They’d been adroit about it.

He stayed in the rest of the night. Sat tight, safe and sound. He did some desultory drinking, I could see him sitting there by the window and his hand would hoist every once in awhile, but not to excess. Apparently everything was under control, the tension had eased, now that, the - trunk was out.

Watching him across the night, I speculated: Why doesn’t he get out? If I am right about him, and I am, why does he stick around—after it? That brought its own answer: Because he doesn’t know anyone’s on to him yet. He doesn’t think there’s any hurry.

To go too soon, right after she has, would be more dangerous than to stay awhile.

The night wore on. I sat there waiting for Boyne’s call. It came later than I thought it would. I picked the phone up in the dark. He was getting ready to go to bed, over there, now. He’d risen from where he’d been sitting drinking in the kitchen, and put the light out. He went into the living room, lit that. He started to pull his shirt-tail up out of his belt. Boyne’s voice was in my ear as my eyes were on him, over there.

Three-cornered arrangement.

“Hello, Jeff? Listen, absolutely nothing. We searched the place while he was out—“ I nearly said, “I know you did, I saw it,” but checked myself in time.

“—and didn’t turn up a thing. But—“ He stopped as though this was going to be important. I waited impatiently for him to go ahead.

“Downstairs in his letter box we found a post card waiting for him. We fished it up out of the slot with bent pins—“

“And?”

“And it was from his wife, written only yesterday from some farm up-country. Here’s the message we copied: ‘Arrived O.K. Already feeling a little better. Love, Anna.’” I said, faintly but stubbornly: “You say, written only yesterday. Have you proof of that? What was the postmark-date on it?”

He made a disgusted sound down in his tonsils. At me, not it. “The postmark was blurred. A corner of it got wet, and the ink smudged.”

“All of it blurred?”

“The year-date,” he admitted. “The hour and the month came out O.K. August. And seven thirty P.M., it was mailed at.”

This time I made the disgusted sound, in my larynx.” August, seven thirty P.M.—1937

or 1939 or 1942. You have no proof how it got into that mail box, whether it came from a letter carrier’s pouch or from the back of some bureau drawer!”

“Give up, Jeff,” he said. “There’s such a thing as going too far.” I don’t know what I would have said. That is, if I hadn’t happened to have my eyes on the Thorwald flat living room windows just then. Probably very little. The post card had shaken me, whether I admitted it or not. But I was looking over there. The light had gone out as soon as he’d taken his shirt off. But the bedroom didn’t light up. A match-flare winked from the living room, low down, as from an easy chair or sofa.

With two unused beds in the bedroom,
he was still staying out of there.

“Boyne,” I said in a glassy voice, “I don’t care what post cards from the other world you’ve turned up, I say that man has done away with his wife! Trace that trunk he shipped out. Open it up when you’ve located it—and I think you’ll find her!” And I hung up without waiting to hear what he was going to do about it. He didn’t ring back, so I suspected he was going to give my suggestion a spin after all, in spite of his loudly proclaimed scepticism.

I stayed there by the window all night, keeping a sort of death-watch. There were two more match-flares after the first, at about half-hour intervals. Nothing more than that.

So possibly he was asleep over there. Possibly not. I had to sleep some time myself, and I finally succumbed in the flaming light of the early sun. Anything that he was going to do, he would have done under cover of darkness and not waited for broad daylight. There wouldn’t be anything much to watch, for a while now. And what was there that he needed to do any more, anyway? Nothing, just sit tight and let a little disarming time slip by.

It seemed like five minutes later that Sam came over and touched me, but it was already high noon. I said irritably: “Didn’t you lamp that note I pinned up, for you to let me sleep?”

He said: “Yeah, but it’s your old friend Inspector Boyne. I figured you’d sure want to—“

It was a personal visit this time. Boyne came into the room behind him without waiting, and without much cordiality.