She Woke to Darkness (4 page)

I used a dime, dialed operator, and put in a collect call to Miami, Florida.

I was tense and keyed-up as I waited. The call went through very fast, and I exhaled a vast sigh of relief when I heard a familiar voice answer at the other end. I heard the operator say she had a collect call from Brett Halliday in New York and would he accept the charges.

Michael Shayne said he would, and she said. “Go ahead, please.”

Mike said, “What the hell, Brett?” and I said, “How fast can you catch a plane to New York?”

“Pretty fast, I guess. Why?”

“I’ve got a case for you.”

“I’ve got a case, Brett.” Mike’s voice was patient and reasoning. “Remember the Rathbone thing I told you about?”

“Lucy can cover you on that. I mean it, Mike. When does the next plane leave?”

“About four, I believe. You in some kind of jam?”

I said, “It’s bad.” Then I gave it to him straight down the line. All of it, from meeting Elsie at the bar to Ed Radin’s phone call.

“Don’t miss the four o’clock plane,” I ended urgently. “That’ll put you in about eight. Come straight to the Berkshire. You know. On Fifty-Second…”

“I know,” he growled, and I remembered he had stayed at the hotel himself a year or two previous while ending a case. “You sit tight and listen to Ed Radin. Best not admit you called me to come. We’ll say I had planned to meet you there all long. And listen, Brett. From what you told me about the girl’s manuscript I suggest you go through it pretty carefully while you’re waiting for the law to catch up with you. If she
has
put herself in the story as you think, it should give us a good line on her character and background. See you soon,” and he hung up.

I went out of the booth and along the corridor and up the stairs again without meeting anyone. I felt a hell of a lot better after bolting my door behind me. Michael Shayne is a name that does swing some weight in New York, even if Brett Halliday doesn’t.

I lit a cigarette and poured a short drink and got out a pencil and sat down again with Elsie’s typescript.

Reading the rest of it was going to be different. Now I knew the girl was dead, and the book would never be completed. Knowing it was basically a true story it suddenly seemed to me that the motive for her murder must be concealed somewhere in the typewritten pages.

I turned to chapter two of Elsie Murray’s manuscript and began to read.

6.

Aline didn’t faint at sight of the dead man. She swayed sideways against the door frame and closed her eyes tightly. She kept them closed, and tottered backward until her legs encountered the edge of the bed.

She sat down and let her eyes open. The back of the man’s head was toward her and she couldn’t see his features. There was a tiny round bald spot in the thinning brown hair. She stared at the bald spot in growing panic, and knew he was a complete stranger. He wore a light tropical suit.

Aline made her eyes stay open, but they kept sliding away from the body. She fought against utter retching misery and tried to force her thoughts into a coherent pattern.

She looked down fearfully at her hands and wrinkled white slip, but saw no sign of blood. She didn’t know yet how the man had been killed. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know…

God, oh God! Oh, God.

She buried her face in her hands and sank sideways on the bed and sobbed again, convulsively. When the tears stopped, she was physically exhausted, but her mind was alert and she knew what she had to do.

Get out of that room for one thing, and trust in God that no one had seen her and recognized her coming in. But before that she must make certain there was nothing left behind that would point to her.

The only thing missing was her handbag. The only place she hadn’t searched was the bathroom.
She couldn’t.
But she knew she had to.

The drive of utter desperation brings a queer sort of strength sometimes. She sat up and took her hands from her face. She reached down with shaking fingers, pulled up the stocking that was loose around her ankle and rolled it above the knee. She picked up her discarded panties and stepped into them with a feeling of repugnance, smoothed her slip and then pulled the print dress over her head.

She kept her eyes carefully averted from the open bathroom door as she went to the mirror and looked unhappily at her disordered hair, her ravaged and tear-stained face, and wished desperately for a comb and compact. Her purse! If she could find it in the bathroom…

She couldn’t waste time now. She stepped into her pumps and walked steadily to the bathroom door. She didn’t look at the body until she found the light switch and clicked it.

She studied the man’s left profile. His face was pallid and waxlike, curiously pinched and shrunken. He was clean-shaven, between thirty and forty years of age, and in death his features gave the unpleasant impression of feral cunning. She would never know, she told herself dully, whether that look had come with death or had been there when she came to the hotel room with him.

The cause of death was now clearly evident. There was a great, gaping wound in his throat that had been inflicted by a very sharp knife or a razor.

She jerked her gaze away and searched the room from the doorway. The tub was empty, and the only two possible places where her bag might be concealed were the closed medicine cabinet and the floor space covered by his body. By holding tightly to the doorframe and leaning inward, Aline was able to open the cabinet. It was empty.

Almost, then, she gave up the search. But the instinct of self-preservation was alive in her, and strength surged up from some depth of her being which made it possible for her to reach down with both hands, get a firm grip on the back of the dead man’s coat between the shoulderblades and drag his body over the sill and into the bedroom.

There was no purse in sight. Only a curious half-outline of his body, where blood had crept along the floor and congealed on the tiles.

But he had pockets, and Aline knew she must go through them. The bag was small enough to fit in a man’s outer jacket pocket. Besides, she had to do everything she could to discover his identity before leaving him. If she could learn who he was… if she could start backtracking through the night at once… before the police started… it was barely possible she might be able to destroy all traces that would point to her as his companion at the death scene.

There was a book of matches in his left side pocket, and a few loose coins in the right. The inner jacket pocket yielded nothing. She knelt beside him with averted face and forced her hand into each of his four trouser pockets, half turning his body to do it.

There was nothing. No keys and no wallet. Not a scrap of paper to identify him.

He had come out of the unknown, a stranger to her… and now he would be a stranger forever.

And she? She had become a stranger to herself. Somehow she must go on living… forever haunted by the fear that
she
might have killed him.

Not that! She couldn’t kill. The last few minutes had proved that she was capable of much she would not have believed possible. But not murder… Besides, if she had murdered him during a blackout, how had she disposed of the murder weapon? And the missing handbag?

Of course, it was possible she had left the bag somewhere or lost it along the way before reaching the hotel room. But the murder weapon had been in the room. And now it wasn’t. Wouldn’t the police accept that fact as evidence that another person had been in the room while she was blacked out?

They wouldn’t. For they would never
know,
as she did, that the knife was not in the room when she woke. The police would have only her word that she hadn’t wakened to find it clutched in her hand, and then disposed of it.

She must be very careful from this point on. She must take nothing for granted. Nothing! Once it was known that she had been the dead man’s companion, every single word she spoke would be suspect.

How could she prove, for instance, that she had actually blacked out and didn’t know what had happened? There was no proof. Only her word. And to give the lie to that would be the testimony of the hotel clerk, the bell-boy and elevator operator who had doubtless seen her come in. Because when she had blacked out like this in the past, there was practically no outward evidence. Even her closest friends were never quite sure. They had laughed about it in the past, and she had laughed with them. Her coordination was scarcely impaired at all. She had been told that there was a slight thickness in her speech, but no more than in most persons after several cocktails.

Anyone who did not know her intimately and who had seen her last night would swear on the witness stand that she might have been a little tight, but certainly in full possession of her faculties.

The dead man must have believed that. He would have had no way of knowing the truth Even the murderer must have been unaware that she was unconscious when the murder was committed.

Why, then, had he gone away leaving her alive to bear witness against him? Of course if he had arrived at the scene after she fell into a coma on the bed, he would know he had nothing to fear from her.

She dragged her thoughts back from useless speculations. The important thing now was to destroy all evidence she had been in the room, and then leave the hotel without being seen.

She stripped the case from one of the pillows and methodically wiped fingerprints from every surface she might have touched. Then she went to the mirror to smooth her hair as best she could with shaking fingers.

At the door, she hesitated, realizing that she was probably destroying the murderer’s fingerprints as well. But what else could she do? She wiped the knob clean and turned it cautiously, inching the door open, and testing the outer knob. It was on the night-latch. The murderer had simply walked out and pulled it shut.

She paused, an instant, undecided whether to wipe the outer knob clean, then suddenly scrubbed it as hard as she could.

Holding the outer knob with the pillow case, she hesitated again, gathering all her strength and courage before stepping out and closing the door. That was the irrevocable step. Once she closed the door she was locked away from her last chance to call the police, tell them the simple truth, and hope they would believe her.

For a moment she was desperately tempted to do that. Wasn’t it what any innocent, law-abiding person would do? Wasn’t running away practically an admission of guilt?

Probably it was. She didn’t care. She couldn’t face it. This way, she had a chance. The other way? Who would believe her story, she asked herself scornfully.

She closed the door firmly with the pillowslip covering her hand, and stood for a moment memorizing the room number, 318. She would have to wait until she was outside to learn the name of the hotel.

She turned and went left toward a small red bulb illuminating a sign that said STAIRS. There was a door which she opened, and, with the cunning of the hunted, she took the upward flight of stairs. She remembered reading a book where a suspect had been trapped by walking
down
a flight instead of up. When he took the elevator from the floor below, the detective had known instantly that he had walked down one flight, and promptly arrested him. The author of the book had pointed out that in panic one invariably takes the easier path, and that if he had walked up instead of down he would never have been suspected.

So Aline walked up. Not one flight. Not just two flights, but three. That put her on the sixth floor and should be as safe as any. She wadded up the pillowslip as she climbed and dropped it in a dark corner on the fifth floor landing.

The sixth-floor corridor was dimly lit and deserted. She walked down it with her heart thumping, past closed doors behind which human beings slept in peace. Some of them snored, and the sound came faintly through open transoms.

She found double elevator doors and pressed the DOWN button. She had not the slightest idea what hour of the night it was, but was sure it was much too late for a respectable woman to be leaving a hotel with no wrap and no make-up, no handbag and her hair in disorder.

Anyone who saw her would think only one thing. Well, let them. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin defiantly when the elevator cables began creaking to bring the car up. She was a floosie, she reminded herself bitterly. A two-dollar whore. So why should she be ashamed or even annoyed if an elevator man and desk clerk took her for a call girl going home from some guest’s room after a late party?

The elevator stopped and the door slid open. The operator was a wizened and aged Negro man wearing a blue uniform with scarlet piping. So far as Aline could tell, he didn’t look at her when she stepped inside.

The door closed and they descended to a small lobby lighted with only two floor lamps. Aline stepped from the car with her chin still high, and her heels clacked on the bare floor toward the safety of a revolving door. She glanced at the desk, but the clerk was not there. A big clock on the wall pointed to 2:50.

Aline went through the revolving door and out onto a deserted sidewalk where a breeze cooled her hot cheeks. She looked at the sign above the hotel. It read, HOTEL HALCYON.

She would remember that, and she would remember a room number. She had not the vaguest idea what part of the city she was in. There were smart apartment houses here, and small specialty shops. She walked toward the nearest corner and discovered she was on Madison Avenue, far uptown from her normal haunts.

Looking up and down the Avenue she saw the welcome UNOCCUPIED lights of a roving taxi going south. She waved it to the curb, and before getting in she said:

“I’ll have to warn you, driver, that I don’t have any money with me. I lost my bag. If you’re willing to drive me to my place on East Twenty-Sixth Street, I’ll be glad to have you come in with me while I get some money to pay you.”

“Hop in, Lady,” he said wearily. “Where’d we all be in this world if none of us never trusted nobody else?” He opened the door, and when Aline got in he pulled away on the almost deserted avenue, leaning back to continue confidentially:

“Take it from me, that’s one of the troubles with this city. New York! Nobody speaks to a man on the street. Nobody’s got a helping hand for them that’s in trouble. Man can die right on a busy street and you’ll see the crowds hurrying by and turning their faces like they’re scared they’ll get contaminated.”

Aline Ferris leaned back against the cushion and closed her eyes and let the driver ramble on. She was really getting good at this business, she congratulated herself. Back there, when she started to get into the cab, it had just come out subconsciously. She hadn’t planned it. But in a flash she had realized that a driver might recall the peculiar circumstances—picking up a penniless female fare, at three-thirty in the morning less than a block from a hotel where a murder had been committed that night, and he would have her address in his logbook.

So she had given him Doris’ address—East 26th Street,—instead of her own. She could borrow money from Doris, and talking with Doris would be a good place to start going back. Doris had been at Bart’s party. She and Jim Cochran had been necking at the bar when Aline allowed the third and fatal martini to be poured into her glass. Doris was the perfect solution to her problem and it had come to her with no planning or forethought whatever. Stopping in to borrow taxi fare was the perfect excuse for waking Doris and having a heart-to-heart talk without waiting until morning.

She broke into the driver’s monologue and gave him Doris’ street number, then relaxed until they reached it.

Doris had what New York calls a “garden apartment” in an old remodeled brownstone, and it was reached by stairs leading down from the sidewalk. When the cab stopped, Aline stepped out and said to the driver, “Wouldn’t you like to come with me to be sure I don’t run out on you?”

“If you wanta run, lady, you run,” he answered broodingly. “Ninety cents on the meter ain’t going to break nobody.”

Aline went down the short flight of steps and rang the bell. It was dark inside, and she kept her finger on the bell for a long time and nothing happened. Then a light showed in the rear, and presently a window beside the door was opened a trifle and Doris’ frightened voice asked, “Who is it?”

“It’s Aline Ferris. I lost my bag and haven’t a penny to pay my taxi fare. I want to borrow a couple of dollars.”

“Aline!” There was an odd breathlessness in Doris’ voice, and she hesitated a moment. Then she said effusively, “Of course, darling. Wait right there until I get my purse. Sure two dollars will be enough?”