The Night People (18 page)

Pacing the cabin, gazing unseeing at the empty laboratory, I knew the answer must lurk here somewhere, within the wooden walls of our temporary home. I went back in my mind over our conversations about Grace. He had loved her, he had wanted her—of that much I was certain. Could he have committed suicide in such a manner that I would be accused of his murder?

No, there were two things against that theory—it wouldn’t get him Grace, and it wouldn’t get me convicted of the crime. Because even now I was all alone with the physical evidence. I could change the scene any way I wanted, invent any story I liked. Chances are, the police would never even make the trip to the cabin to check my story. I had already called it suicide in my radio report, but I could change it to accident. And there was no one to call it murder.

No one but myself.

I went outside again and started sifting through the snow where I’d found the rifle. But there was nothing—a few bits of icicle, but nothing more. Here and there one of Fuller’s footprints remained undrifted, from his icicle-breaking expedition, but I could identify no other prints. If someone had stood at that window to kill Charlie Fuller—

But no one could have! I stared at the window with growing wonder. The snow and crystallized frost had made it completely opaque, as I’d already noticed during the night. Even if an invisible murderer had dropped from the sky, and somehow got Charlie’s rifle out of the cabin, he could not have fired at Charlie through that window because he could not have seen him through it!

So where did that leave me?

I went back inside to the rifle, emptied it, and tried the trigger. It had been adjusted to a hair trigger—the slightest pressure of my finger was enough to click the hammer on the empty chamber.

Suddenly I felt that I was on the verge of it, that I almost had the answer. I stood staring at the blanket-covered figure in the chair, then went outside and looked through the bullet hole at it again. Lined up perfectly, even through an opaque window.

And then I knew who had murdered Charlie Fuller.

I was staring at his body in the chair, but it was
my
chair! Twenty minutes, a half hour later, and I would have been sitting in that very chair, eating breakfast. Charlie would have called me when the coffee was ready, and I would have come out to sit in that chair, as I did every morning.

And Charlie Fuller would have killed me.

It took me five minutes of excited sorting through the bits of icicle in the snow under the window to find the one that was something more. It was ice, all right, but ice encased in a tiny heat-sealed plastic pouch. We used pouches of all sizes in the lab, for the rock specimens we collected. This one had served a different purpose.

Charlie had driven one of the large icicles into the snow and balanced the rifle on top of it—probably freezing it to the icicle with a few drops of water. Then he’d wiped away a tiny speck of frost on the window to line up the gun barrel with the chair in which I would be sitting. He’d fixed the rifle with a hair trigger, and then jammed the tiny plastic pouch of water between the front of the trigger and the guard.

When the water in the pouch froze, the ice expanded against the trigger, and the rifle fired through the window at the chair. The recoil had thrown the rifle free of its icicle support, and the frozen pouch of water had dropped into the snow like a simple piece of ice.

And what had gone wrong? Charlie Fuller must have timed the freezing of the water-filled pouch, but he probably hadn’t timed it in subzero cold with a wind blowing. The water had simply frozen sooner than he’d planned—while he was sitting in my chair for a moment, adjusting it to the precise all-important position facing the window.

But why had he gone to all that trouble to kill me when we were alone? I thought about that all the way back to Caribou in the snowmobile. He’d probably feared that it would be like the animals he’d told me about, that at the final moment he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze the trigger. Perhaps in the night he’d even stood over my bed with his rifle, unable to go through with it. This way had made it impersonal, like a lab experiment to be set up and observed.

So Charlie Fuller had murdered himself. But for the authorities, and for Grace, I decided to stick to the suicide story. I didn’t think they’d bother too much about things like the absence of powder burns. Under the circumstances they were stuck with my story, and I wanted to keep it simple. As I said in the beginning, I’m no detective.

J
OYCE IRELAND FIRST NOTICED
the man in the elevator on a rainy Tuesday in October. Perhaps she noticed him because they were the only two without raincoats. She didn’t need one for her daily trip to the bank on the first floor, and seeing him coatless she guessed he too must be on business inside the building.

He was a tall man, not handsome, with black bushy eyebrows that one noticed before anything else. Joyce came, in fact, to think of him as “The Man with the Eyebrows” when she saw him again on the same elevator two days later. She would have guessed his age at about 35, though he could have been older, and she noticed at once that he wore no wedding ring. At 28, Joyce Ireland was a girl who noticed things like that.

She had lived alone in a little downtown apartment since the death of her mother the year before. It was a lonely sort of existence, which made her long for the far-away places she’d never be able to see on the $87.50 a week take-home-pay she received from Worldwide Finance Company. In October, with another winter on the way, she had the distinct feeling that life was passing her by. Perhaps it was her looks that were against her. She’d never been pretty, and with the coming of the miniskirt even her unattractive knees were now revealed to the world.

That was why she began to notice the man with the bushy eyebrows. When he got into the elevator behind her for the third time in a week, she had the wild thought that he was trying to pick her up—a shy lover who had seen her on the street and followed her to the office. Now he would present himself for her approval, and she would get away from Worldwide Finance forever.

That was her first thought. The second one was that he was going to rob her.

Joyce made the trip from Worldwide to the ground-floor bank every afternoon at the same time—just a few minutes before the 3:00 bank closing. She always carried a large brown envelope filled with the checks and cash they’d taken in since the previous afternoon. Because of the nature of its business most payments to Worldwide Finance were in cash—very few Worldwide customers had checking accounts. The afternoon trip to the bank was a ritual dating from the days when a girl might carry a few hundred dollars down in the elevator with her. Now, with business increasing steadily, Joyce sometimes had as much as $5,000 in the bulky envelope, especially late in the week when their customers came in faithfully with their pay envelopes.

This day, a Friday, she’d made up the deposit herself, and she knew she carried $4,355 in cash and a number of checks. She clutched the envelope a little tighter to her bosom, but of course the man with the bushy eyebrows did nothing. There were three other men in the elevator, and they rode all the way down. Perhaps, she decided, the man was waiting for a day when he was alone with her, to grab the money and run.

Though nothing happened on Friday she thought about the man all weekend, and she decided finally that he
was
a thief. There was no doubt about it in her mind. At one point, on Saturday night, she was in the act of phoning her boss, Mr. Melrose, to tell him, but then she hung up. He would think she was foolish, or else question why she hadn’t told him sooner. Mr. Melrose was like that.

Besides, what did she owe the company? Not much for a measly $87.50 a week. Not when she was secretary and part-time bookkeeper and hadn’t had a raise in three years. She was thinking about that last part when the idea came to her—slowly at first, in bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Suppose, just suppose, there was a robbery and the bandit got away with the money.

But suppose, she went on in her mind, the bandit lost the money, too. Suppose she—Joyce Ireland—ended up with the four or five thousand dollars. Who would be the loser? Not Worldwide Finance—they were insured against robbery. Certainly not the bandit, who didn’t deserve the money in the first place. It would be hers, all hers, like finding it in the street, like inheriting it from a rich uncle she’d never known.

With all that money she could travel to Florida or California, buy a new car, a whole new wardrobe of dresses that would make men notice her at last. She could leave the dingy apartment where she was wasting her life away—leave and be free.

On Sunday night, as the last piece of her plan clicked into place, Joyce Ireland decided to steal the bank deposit.

The man with the bushy eyebrows did not appear on Monday or Tuesday, and for a time she began to think it had been all her imagination, that he never had planned to rob her in the elevator. She became nervous and irritable at work as she waited for “The Man with the Eyebrows” to reappear, and one day even Mr. Melrose was moved to comment on her mood.

“What’s the matter, Joyce?” he asked after one of her outbursts. “Have a fight with your boyfriend?”

She wanted to tell him that his remark showed how little he knew or cared about her private life, but she held her tongue. “I just have a little headache,” she answered finally. “It’s nothing.”

Mr. Melrose was big and jolly and red-faced, and most customers seemed to like him. Sometimes they still liked him even after he’d sent collectors to their homes or started garnishing their salaries.

“Take the rest of the afternoon off if you’d like,” he suggested with rare benevolence. “Tuesday’s always pretty slow.”

“Thanks, but I’ll be all right.”

Nothing happened on Wednesday either, and she took to watching for the bushy-eyebrowed man on her lunch hour, hoping to see him somewhere on the street. But he did not reappear. By Thursday she was about to abandon the careful preparations she’d been making each day and forget the whole thing.

But Thursday was the 15th of October, and she knew the 1st and 15th brought even more payments than the usual payday. By noon there were people lined up with their payment books and their money, and by 2:30 Mr. Melrose was out of his office asking the other girl, “How much cash have we taken in so far today, Sue?”

The girl, a dumb brunette whom Joyce despised, looked at the column and replied, “Just $5,275, Mr. Melrose.”

He nodded. “Joyce, you’d better go down with it now. I get nervous with that much cash in the office.”

She nodded and picked up the big handbag she’d bought only a few days earlier. Then she waited while the brunette stuffed the money and checks and deposit slips into the familiar brown envelope. “Here you are,” Sue said finally, handing it over.

Joyce took the envelope and her bag and left the office, walking down the hall to the elevator as she had so many times before. As she stood alone waiting for the elevator to reach her floor, she’d half forgotten about the man with the bushy eyebrows. It wasn’t until she stepped into the car that he suddenly appeared and hurried in behind her. She felt her heart begin to thump with excitement.

There was only one other passenger in the elevator, an elderly woman who would be no protection at all. If he was ever going to do it this would be the day. She clutched the fat brown envelope closer.

The elevator made no other stops as it dropped steadily toward the ground floor. Just the three of them, silent passengers in a sealed world. Joyce waited.

The man shifted his feet a little and cleared his throat. The elderly woman simply waited. The elevator bumped to a stop on the ground floor and the doors slid open. There was the busy lobby, the bank—and nothing had happened.

The man smiled and allowed the elderly woman to step out. Joyce started to follow, and then he clipped her on the jaw with his fist.

It happened so fast she had no time to think. She fell sprawling out of the elevator as he snatched the brown envelope from her suddenly limp hands. Then he was running, and the elderly woman was screaming, and hands were grasping at Joyce.

“You all right, lady?”

She tried to talk, to wipe the blur from her eyes, and she couldn’t. For a moment she thought her jaw was broken, but then words came. “Money—he took the money—”

“Don’t worry, lady. They’ll get him.”

She put a hand to her jaw, feeling for the first time the beginning of a dull throbbing pain. Her next thought was for her handbag, and she clutched it to her. “It was the bank deposit,” she managed to say as two men helped her to her feet. “He got away with it all.”

A policeman came into the lobby, apparently summoned from traffic duty. “You all right—not hurt?”

“He—he hit me on the jaw, but I don’t think it’s broken.”

“The guy got away, but there’s an alarm out for him. What did he look like?”

“Tall, bushy eyebrows, black hair. About thirty-five.”

“Ever see him before?”

“I—” She hesitated only an instant. “No, not that I remember.”

He was writing it all down. “Okay, lady. Now how much money did he get?”

“Over five thousand. I forget the exact amount.”

“We’d better go up to your office,” he said, taking her arm.

Upstairs, Mr. Melrose went into a state of panic. He barely asked how Joyce was feeling before he started pacing the office floor and wringing his hands. “What will they say in New York?” he mumbled. Worldwide Finance’s home office was located there. “They’ll think I don’t know how to manage this place. They’ll ask why I trusted so much money to an office girl.”

“There was nothing I could do, Mr. Melrose! He took me so by surprise.” Her jaw was beginning to swell now, and she resented his attitude. It only justified in her mind what she had done.

The policeman took down the exact amount of the loss and went away. The brunette followed Joyce into the restroom and tried to soothe her, applying a cold towel to her swollen jaw. Finally, when she was alone, Joyce stole a glance into her large handbag. The original brown envelope with its $5,275 deposit nestled safety in the bottom, hidden beneath cigarettes and Kleenex and a key case.