101 Mystery Stories

89 Somebody on the Phone Cornell Woolrich

“I hear it! Let it ring!” she snapped back at me. We were always snapping at each other. That’s how you could tell we were brother and sister. But this snap had teeth in it. There was something frightened, tense, about it. And her face matched it — white, drawn, straining forward.

She was right in the room with it, sitting facing it in a big chair. She didn’t make a move to go over and answer it. She just sat there listening to it, as if she’d never heard one before, as if she wanted to see how long it would keep up.

I happened to look at her hand on the arm of the chair. It was heel down, but the fingers were uptilted; they weren’t touching the chair arm. And at each ring that sounded, I saw one press down, as if she were counting them to herself. The pinkie, then the ring finger, then the middle, then the index, then the thumb. Like someone practicing scales on a piano keyboard.

On the fifth ring, the thumb count, it quit. A moment’s stop, as though the connection had been broken at the other end, and then it got under way again.

“You paralyzed?” I said. A whole layer of shaving cream was evaporating on me on account of this foolishness. But when she saw me step out to go over to the phone, she left her chair like something out of a slingshot, and backed up against it to keep from getting at it.

“No, Ken! Let it alone!” There was desperation in her voice. And then the ringing quit a second time, for good, and that ended it for her. But not for me.

“You’re white as a ghost. Who was that? What’s going on around here? A code too, eh? Maybe you think I missed that! You count the number of rings. The other end hangs up on five, then calls right back. If the coast is clear you answer. That’s bad medicine. Maybe you think I didn’t see you at the Congo Club last Tuesday night with some guy who looked like a cardshark?”

She gave me a comet of a look — a white, startled flash.

“I didn’t butt in,” I said, “because you’ve always been very levelheaded. You’ve always known your way around. One thing sure, it wasn’t a social meeting. I watched the two of you. You weren’t there for dancing or for drinking; you were there to talk business.”

She shivered as if the room were cold, but it was July. She tried to put a bold front on it. “Go ahead, cable Dad and Mother in London — all because I don’t answer a phone call. You should be a scenario writer.”

I was shrugging into my coat. “I’ve got to make the bank before closing time. Tomorrow’s payday at the firm. I want to talk to you some more about this when I get back. Stick around.”

“I’ll stick around,” she said. I couldn’t get rid of that for years afterward: “I’ll stick around.”

The teller handed back my check to me. “No funds, Mr. Hunter.”

I nearly went down on the marble floor. “Why, there was twenty thousand in that account on the first of last month!” The office salaries and upkeep had to come out of it, and our living expenses; Dad had given both of us access to it when he went away.

“Not only that. You’re overdrawn by another thousand. We called you about it yesterday, and Miss Hunter took the message.”

“Well, where’s my statement? Show me the canceled checks? Who’s been drawing on it?”

“We mailed that to you early in the week,” he said. I thought: She must have intercepted it, then...

I went back and she was waiting for me as she’d said she would. She was dressed to go out, though. I grabbed her by the wrist and swung her all the way around.

“Who took you for a cleaning?” I said. “Who’s been shaking you down? Where’s the pearls Dad gave you for Christmas? Take off your glove — where’s your diamond solitaire? You’ve been gambling again, haven’t you?” Her head went down.

“And they found out who you were, found out we’re well-heeled, knew that a scandal would kill Dad, and have been putting the screws on you ever since. Is that it?”

Her head went down a second time.

“That was what that call was, on the phone before, that frightened you so. Wasn’t it?”

This time she spoke. “Yes, Ken, that was what that was.”

“Gimme the guy’s name,” I said.

“Oh, don’t!” she begged. “It’ll ruin all of us. Wait here a minute. I have a better way than that. Let me handle it my way.” She went into her room and closed the door.

I paced back and forth. Finally I went over and rapped. “Jean,” I said, “you coming out? I want to talk to you!”

Before she could answer, the doorbell rang and a sleepy-looking cop was standing there. “Hunter? Take it easy now, take it easy,” he said for no apparent reason. “Your sister—”

I had no time to bother. “What d’you want? She’s in her room.”

“No, she isn’t,” he said. “She just fell fifteen stories down to the street. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

I knew almost at once what I was going to do, even while they were still asking me the routine questions.

“We were going out together,” I said through my hands, “and she remembered she’d left the window open in her room. She went back a minute to close it. I guess she must have—”

Yes, they agreed sympathetically, she must have. And they went out and closed the door.

I’d had the gun, and the license for it, ever since that time we’d been burglarized at Great Neck, I got it out and made sure it was loaded. This was a sentence — here in my mind — that no clever lawyer could set side or whittle down to nothing. This was a sentence that smirched no names except mine. Oh, any excuse would do. I didn’t like his necktie, or he’d stepped on my foot. This was a sentence from which there was no appeal. Because somebody had killed her — by calling her up on the phone. The law mightn’t see it that way, but I did.

It might have seemed a funny place to go, that very night while she was broken and white and all alone with just flowers. The Congo Club, with its clatter and its rainbow spotlights. It didn’t to me; it seemed the right place, the only place.

“... where that empty table is, inside that booth there. Last Tuesday night, with a very pretty girl.” I killed my drink at this point, and it was all salty. “I want to know who the man was.”

For a hundred dollars anyone’ll remember anything. “That was Buck Franklin,” the manager said. “He’s the club owner himself. Some sort of private gambling place. He comes here quite a lot. I expect them both tonight again. He reserved that same table.”

I squeezed my glass hard with one hand and got another drop out of it; the liquid would hardly go down my throat, though. Stuck in the middle. And the glass cracked and split in two pieces. “No, he won’t be here tonight — with her,” I said quietly. “That’s why I’ve got to reach him. I’ve got a message for him — from her.”

One of the hackmen that had the concession outside might know, he suggested. The third on line admitted he knew who the man was and had driven him home from here numerous times. He couldn’t remember where, though. He said the man always gave him a five-dollar tip on each haul. I gave him fifty, and then he remembered where.

He took me to the apartment.

It was him all right, the same man who had been with her at the Congo Club. He was waiting for me by the open door, after I’d been announced and sent up. “You say you’ve got a message for me from Miss Jean Hunter?”

“You know her then, do you?”

“Sure I know her.”

“Let’s close the door and keep this just between us,” I suggested. He closed it.

“I’ve been waiting to hear from her all evening,” he said aggrievedly. “I’ve tried to reach her at her apartment, and she’s not there.”

“No, she’s not there,” I agreed, unbuttoning my jacket so I could get at my back pocket.

“I’m a busy man,” he said. “I put myself out to do her a favor, because I feel sorry for her, and then she keeps me waiting—”

“That’s her ring,” I interrupted. He was breathing on a diamond solitaire he’d taken out of his vest pocket, and absentmindedly rubbing it on the back of his hand.

“She gave it to me as collateral for a loan. I’m not sure it’s worth what I let her have, but I always was an easy mark for a femme in trouble. I suppose she’s out right now trying to raise the rest of it. I hope she does for her sake.”

“Loan? Is that what they’re calling it now?” I said without heat. “I think you better turn around. The back is about the right place.”

He didn’t. He got out two words after the first shot. Two husky breaths that didn’t touch his larynx walls at all. “What — for?”

“For Jean Hunter... Here’s your code back again,” I said above the noise, while I kept punching the trigger in and out. “Five times, then quit, then call back again.”

He was down long before the last one, so I gave it to him on the floor. I took the ring back, but I threw the gun down beside him in exchange.

There was evidently no one there with him, and the place must have been soundproofed. No one seemed to have heard it outside in the hall when I went out there. On the way down I was going to tell the elevator operator, “I just shot that Franklin guy up there.” But then I thought, “Aw, let them come over to my place after me, if they want me!” I went home.

The door was still closed, where she’d gone in that afternoon and never come out again.

“It’s taken care of, Jean,” I said quietly, as if she were still in there. “He won’t be calling you up any—”

Just then it started to ring. Brring! — one. Brring! — two. Brring! — three. Brring! — four. Brring — five. Then it stopped for a minute.

Then it started in again.