A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

It Had To Be Murder

I didn’t know their names. I’d never heard their voices. I didn’t even know them by sight, strictly speaking, for their faces were too small to fill in with identifiable features at that distance. Yet I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. They were the rear-window dwellers around me.

Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom. That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea. The idea was, my movements were strictly limited just around this time. I could get from the window to the bed, and from the bed to the window, and that was all. The bay window was about the best feature my rear bedroom had in the warm weather. It was unscreened, so I had to sit with the light out or I would have had every insect in the vicinity in on me. I couldn’t sleep, because I was used to getting plenty of exercise. I’d never acquired the habit of reading books to ward off boredom, so I hadn’t that to turn to. Well, what should I do, sit there with my eyes tightly shuttered?

Just to pick a few at random: Straight over, and the windows square, there was a young jitter-couple, kids in their teens, only just married. It would have killed them to stay home one night. They were always in such a hurry to go, wherever it was they went, they never remembered to turn out the lights. I don’t think it missed once in all the time I was watching. But they never forgot altogether, either. I was to learn to call this delayed action, as you will see. He’d always come skittering madly back in about five minutes, probably from all the way down in the street, and rush around killing the switches. Then fall over something in the dark on his way out. They gave me an inward chuckle, those two.

The next house down, the windows already narrowed a little with perspective. There was a certain light in that one that always went out each night too. Something about it, it used to make me a little sad. There was a woman living there with her child, a young widow I suppose. I’d see her put the child to bed, and then bend over and kiss her in a wistful sort of way. She’d shade the light off her and sit there painting her eyes and mouth. Then she’d go out. She’d never come back till the night was nearly spent—

Once I was still up, and I looked and she was sitting there motionless with her head buried in her arms. Something about it, it used to make me a little sad.

The third one down no longer offered any insight, the windows were just slits like in a medieval battlement, due to foreshortening. That brings us around to the one on the end. In that one, frontal vision came back full-depth again, since it stood at right angles to the rest, my own included, sealing up the inner hollow all these houses backed on. I could see into it, from the rounded projection of my bay window, as freely as into a doll house with its rear wall sliced away. And scaled down to about the same size.

It was a flat building. Unlike all the rest it had been constructed originally as such, not just cut up into furnished rooms. It topped them by two stories and had rear fire escapes, to show for this distinction. But it was old, evidently hadn’t shown a profit. It was in the process of being modernized. Instead of clearing the entire building while the work was going on, they were doing it a flat at a time, in order to lose as little rental income as possible. Of the six rearward flats it offered to view, the topmost one had already been completed, but not yet rented. They were working on the fifth-floor one now, disturbing the peace of everyone all up and down the “inside” of the block with their hammering and sawing.

I felt sorry for the couple in the flat below. I used to wonder how they stood it with that bedlam going on above their heads. To make it worse the wife was in chronic poor health, too; I could tell that even at a distance by the listless way she moved about over there, and remained in her bathrobe without dressing. Sometimes I’d see her sitting by the window, holding her head. I used to wonder why he didn’t have a doctor in to look her over, but maybe they couldn’t afford it. He seemed to be out of work. Often their bedroom light was on late at night behind the drawn shade, as though she were unwell and he was sitting up with her. And one night in particular he must have had to sit up with her all night, it remained on until nearly daybreak. Not that I sat watching all that time. But the light was still burning at three in the morning, when I finally transferred from chair to bed to see if I could get a little sleep myself. And when I failed to, and hopscotched back again around dawn, it was still peering wanly out behind the tan shade.

Moments later, with the first brightening of day, it suddenly dimmed around the edges of the shade, and then shortly afterward, not that one, but a shade in one of the other rooms — for all of them alike had been down — went up, and I saw him standing there looking out.

He was holding a cigarette in his hand. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell it was that by the quick, nervous little jerks with which he kept putting his hand to his mouth, and the haze I saw rising around his head. Worried about her, I guess. I didn’t blame him for that. Any husband would have been. She must have only just dropped off to sleep, after night-long suffering. And then in another hour or so, at the most, that sawing of wood and clattering of buckets was going to start in over them again. Well, it wasn’t any of my business, I said to myself, but he really ought to get her out of there. If I had an ill wife on my hands...

He was leaning slightly out, maybe an inch past the window frame, carefully scanning the back faces of all the houses abutting on the hollow square that lay before him. You can tell, even at a distance, when a person is looking fixedly. There’s something about the way the head is held. And yet his scrutiny wasn’t held fixedly to any one point, it was a slow, sweeping one, moving along the houses on the opposite side from me first. When it got to the end of them, I knew it would cross over to my side and come back along there. Before it did, I withdrew several yards inside my room, to let it go safely by. I didn’t want him to think I was sitting there prying into his affairs. There was still enough blue night-shade in my room to keep my slight withdrawal from catching his eye.

When I returned to my original position a moment or two later, he was gone. He had raised two more of the shades. The bedroom one was still down. I wondered vaguely why he had given that peculiar, comprehensive, semicircular stare at all the rear windows around him. There wasn’t anyone at any of them, at such an hour. It wasn’t important, of course. It was just a little oddity, it failed to blend in with his being worried or disturbed about his wife. When you’re worried or disturbed, that’s an internal preoccupation, you stare vacantly at nothing at all. When you stare around you in a great sweeping arc at windows, that betrays external preoccupation, outward interest. One doesn’t quite jibe with the other. To call such a discrepancy trifling is to add to its importance. Only someone like me, stewing in a vacuum of total idleness, would have noticed it at all.

The flat remained lifeless after that, as far as could be judged by its windows. He must have either gone out or gone to bed himself. Three of the shades remained at normal height, the one masking the bedroom remained down. Sam, my day houseman, came in not long after with my eggs and morning paper, and I had that to kill time with for awhile. I stopped thinking about other people’s windows and staring at them.

The sun slanted down on one side of the hollow oblong all morning long, then it shifted over to the other side for the afternoon. Then it started to slip off both alike, and it was evening again — another day gone.

The lights started to come on around the quadrangle. Here and there a wall played back, like a sounding board, a snatch of radio program that was coming in too loud. If you listened carefully you could hear an occasional click of dishes mixed in, faint, far off. The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free. The jitterbugs made their nightly dash for the great open spaces, forgot their lights, he came careening back, thumbed them out, and their place was dark until the early morning hours. The woman put her child to bed, leaned mournfully over its cot, then sat down with heavy despair to redden her mouth.

In the fourth-floor flat at right angles to the long, interior “street” the three shades had remained up, and the fourth shade had remained at full length, all day long. I hadn’t been conscious of that because I hadn’t particularly been looking at it, or thinking of it, until now. My eyes may have rested on those windows at times, during the day, but my thoughts had been elsewhere. It was only when a light suddenly went up in the end room behind one of the raised shades, which was their kitchen, that I realized that the shades had been untouched like that all day. That also brought something else to my mind that hadn’t been in it until now: I hadn’t seen the woman all day. I hadn’t seen any sign of life within those windows until now.

He’d come in from outside. The entrance was at the opposite side of their kitchen, away from the window. He’d left his hat on, so I knew he’d just come in from the outside.

He didn’t remove his hat As though there was no one there to remove it for any more. Instead, he pushed it farther to the back of his head by pronging a hand to the roots of his hair. That gesture didn’t denote removal of perspiration, I knew. To do that a person makes a sidewise sweep — this was up over his forehead. It indicated some sort of harassment or uncertainty. Besides, if he’d been suffering from excess warmth, the first thing he would have done would be to take off his hat altogether.

She didn’t come out to greet him. The first link, of the so-strong chain of habits, of custom, that binds us all, had snapped wide open.

She must be so ill she had remained in bed, in the room behind the lowered shade, all day. I watched. He remained where he was, two rooms away from there. Expectancy became surprise, surprise incomprehension. Funny, I thought, that he doesn’t go in to her. Or at least go as far as the doorway, look in to see how she is.

Maybe she was asleep, and he didn’t want to disturb her. Then immediately: but how can he know for sure that she’s asleep, without at least looking in at her? He just came in himself.

He came forward and stood there by the window, as he had at dawn. Sam had carried out my tray quite some time before, and my fights were out. I held my ground, I knew he couldn’t see me within the darkness of the bay window. He stood there motionless for several minutes. And now his attitude was the proper one for inner preoccupation. He stood there looking downward at nothing, lost in thought.

He’s worried about her, I said to myself, as any man would be. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Funny, though, he should leave her in the dark like that, without going near her. If he’s worried, then why didn’t he at least look in on her on returning? Here was another of those trivial discrepancies, between inward motivation and outward indication. And just as I was thinking that, the original one, that I had noted at daybreak, repeated itself. His head went up with renewed alertness, and I could see it start to give that slow circular sweep of interrogation around the panorama of rearward windows again. True, the light was behind him this time, but there was enough of it falling on him to show me the microscopic but continuous shift of direction his head made in the process. I remained carefully immobile until the distant glance had passed me safely by. Motion attracts.

Why is he so interested in other people’s windows, I wondered detachedly. And of course an effective brake to dwell on that thought too lingeringly clamped down almost at once: Look who’s talking. What about you yourself?

An important difference escaped me. I wasn’t worried about anything. He, presumably, was.

Down came the shades again. The lights stayed on behind their beige opaqueness. But behind the one that had remained down all along, the room remained dark.

Time went by. Hard to say how much — a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes. A cricket chirped in one of the back yards. Sam came in to see if I wanted anything before he went home for the night. I told him no, I didn’t — it was all right, run along. He stood there for a minute, head down. Then I saw him shake it slightly, as if at something he didn’t like. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You know what that means? My old mammy told it to me, and she never told me a lie in her life. I never once seen it to miss, either.”

“What, the cricket?”

“Any time you hear one of them things, that’s a sign of death — someplace close around.”

I swept the back of my hand at him. “Well, it isn’t in here, so don’t let it worry you.”

He went out, muttering stubbornly: “It’s somewhere close by, though. Somewhere not very far off. Got to be.”

The door closed after him, and I stayed there alone in the dark.

It was a stifling night, much closer than the one before. I could hardly get a breath of air even by the open window at which I sat. I wondered how he — that unknown over there — could stand it behind those drawn shades.

Then suddenly, just as idle speculation about this whole matter was about to alight on some fixed point in my mind, crystallize into something like suspicion, up came the shades again, and off it flitted, as formless as ever and without having had a chance to come to rest on anything.

He was in the middle windows, the living room. He’d taken off his coat and shirt, was bare-armed in his undershirt. He hadn’t been able to stand it himself, I guess — the sultriness.

I couldn’t make out what he was doing at first. He seemed to be busy in a perpendicular, up-and-down way rather than lengthwise. He remained in one place, but he kept dipping down out of sight and then straightening up into view again, at irregular intervals. It was almost like some sort of calisthenic exercise, except that the dips and rises weren’t evenly timed enough for that. Sometimes he’d stay down a long time, sometimes he’d bob right up again, sometimes he’d go down two or three times in rapid succession. There was some sort of a widespread black V railing him off from the window. Whatever it was, there was just a sliver of it showing above the upward inclination to which the window still deflected my line of vision. All it did was strike off the bottom of his undershirt, to the extent of a sixteenth of an inch maybe. But I haven’t seen it there at other times, and I couldn’t tell what it was.

Suddenly he left it for the first time since the shades had gone up, came out around it to the outside, stooped down into another part of the room, and straightened again with an armful of what looked like varicolored pennants at the distance at which I was. He went back behind the V and allowed them to fall across the top of it for a moment, and stay that way. He made one of his dips down out of sight and stayed that way a good while.

The “pennants” slung across the V kept changing color right in front of my eyes. I have very good sight. One moment they were white, the next red, the next blue.

Then I got it. They were a woman’s dresses, and he was pulling them down to him one by one, taking the topmost one each time. Suddenly they were all gone, the V was black and bare again, and his torso had reappeared. I knew what it was now, and what he was doing. The dresses had told me. He confirmed it for me. He spread his arms to the ends of the V, I could see him heave and hitch, as if exerting pressure, and suddenly the V had folded up, become a cubed wedge. Then he made rolling motions with his whole upper body, and the wedge disappeared off to one side.

He’d been packing a trunk, packing his wife’s things into a large upright trunk.

He reappeared at the kitchen window presently, stood still for a moment. I saw him draw his arm across his forehead, not once but several times, and then whip the end of it off into space. Sure, it was hot work for such a night. Then he reached up along the wall and took something down. Since it was the kitchen he was in, my imagination had to supply a cabinet and a bottle.

I could see the two or three quick passes his hand made to his mouth after that. I said to myself tolerantly: That’s what nine men out of ten would do after packing a trunk — take a good stiff drink. And if the tenth didn’t, it would only be because he didn’t have any liquor at hand.

Then he came closer to the window again, and standing edgewise to the side of it, so that only a thin paring of his head and shoulder showed, peered watchfully out into the dark quadrilateral, along the line of windows, most of them unlighted by now, once more. He always started on the left-hand side, the side opposite mine, and made his circuit of inspection from there on around.

That was the second time in one evening I’d seen him do that. And once at daybreak, made three times altogether. I smiled mentally. You’d almost think he felt guilty about something. It was probably nothing, just an odd little habit, a quirk, that he didn’t know he had himself. I had them myself, everyone does.

He withdrew into the room, and it blacked out his figure passed into the one that was still lighted next to it, the living room. That blacked next. It didn’t surprise me that the third room, the bedroom with the drawn shade, didn’t light up on his entering there. He wouldn’t want to disturb her, of course — particularly if she was going away tomorrow for her health, as his packing of her trunk showed. She needed all the rest she could get, before making the trip. Simple enough for him to slip into bed in the dark.

It did surprise me, though, when a match-flare winked some time later, to have it still come from the darkened living room. He must be lying down in there, trying to sleep on a sofa or something for the night. He hadn’t gone near the bedroom at all, was staying out of it altogether. That puzzled me, frankly. That was carrying solicitude almost too far.

Ten minutes or so later, there was another matchwink, still from that same living room window. He couldn’t sleep.

The night brooded down on both of us alike, the curiosity-monger in the bay window, the chain-smoker in the fourth-floor flat, without giving any answer. The only sound was that interminable cricket.

I was back at the window again with the first sun of morning. Not because of him. My mattress was like a bed of hot coals.

Sam found me there when he came in to get things ready for me. “You’re going to be a wreck, Mr. Jeff,” was all he said.

First, for awhile, there was no sign of life over there. Then suddenly I saw his head bob up from somewhere down out of sight in the living room, so I knew I’d been right; he’d spent the night on a sofa or easy chair in there. Now, of course, he’d look in at her, to see how she was, find out if she felt any better. That was only common ordinary humanity. He hadn’t been near her, so far as I could make out, since two nights before.

He didn’t. He dressed, and he went in the opposite direction, into the kitchen, and wolfed something in there, standing up and using both hands. Then he suddenly turned and moved off side, in the direction in which I knew the flat-entrance to be, as if he had just heard some summons, like the doorbell.

Sure enough, in a moment he came back, and there were two men with him in leather aprons. Expressmen. I saw him standing by while they laboriously maneuvered that cubed black wedge out between them, in the direction they’d just come from. He did more than just stand by. He practically hovered over them, kept shifting from side to side, he was so anxious to see that it was done right.

Then he came back alone, and I saw him swipe his arm across his head, as though it was he, not they, who was all heated up from the effort.

So he was forwarding her trunk, to wherever it was she was going. That was all.

He reached up along the wall again and took something down. He was taking another drink. Two. Three. I said to myself, a little at a loss: Yes, but he hasn’t just packed a trunk this time. That trunk has been standing packed and ready since last night. Where does the hard work come in? The sweat and the need for a bracer?

Now, at last, after all those hours, he finally did go in to her. I saw his form pass through the living room and go beyond, into the bedroom. Up went the shade, that had been down all this time. Then he turned his head and looked around behind him. In a certain way, a way that was unmistakable, even from where I was. Not in one certain direction, as one looks at a person. But from side to side, and up and down, and all around, as one looks at — an empty room.

He stepped back, bent a little, gave a fling of his arms, and an unoccupied mattress and bedding upended over the foot of a bed, stayed that way, emptily curved. A second one followed a moment later.

She wasn’t in there.

They use the expression “delayed action.” I found out then what it meant. For two days a sort of formless uneasiness, a disembodied suspicion, I don’t know what to call it, had been flitting and volplaning around in my mind, like an insect looking for a landing place. More than once, just as it had been ready to settle, some slight thing, some slight reassuring thing, such as the raising of the shades after they had been down unnaturally long, had been enough to keep it winging aimlessly, prevent it from staying still long enough for me to recognize it. The point of contact had been there all along, waiting to receive it. Now, for some reason, within a split second after he tossed over the empty mattresses, it landed — zoom! And the point of contact expanded — or exploded, whatever you care to call it — into a certainty of murder.

In other words, the rational part of my mind was far behind the instinctive, subconscious part. Delayed action. Now the one had caught up to the other. The thought-message that sparked from the synchronization was: He’s done something to her!

I looked down and my hand was bunching the goods over my kneecap, it was knotted so tight. I forced it to open. I said to myself, steadyingly: Now wait a minute, be careful, go slow. You’ve seen nothing. You know nothing. You only have the negative proof that you don’t see her any more.

Sam was standing there looking over at me from the pantryway. He said accusingly: “You ain’t touched a thing. And your face looks like a sheet.”

It felt like one. It had that needling feeling, when the blood has left it involuntarily. It was more to get him out of the way and give myself some elbow room for undisturbed thinking, than anything else, that I said: “Sam, what’s the street address of that building down there? Don’t stick your head too far out and gape at it.”

“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 was 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 trunk. 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 rear 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 canceled out points 1, 2, 3, 4. It left points 5 and 6 totally unimportant and unincriminating. But when it came up against 7, I 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 wants 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 the 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—”

Marshaled 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 neighbors 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’m 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 shirttail 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 OK. 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 comer of it got wet, and the ink smudged.”

“All of it blurred?”

“The year-date,” he admitted. “The hour and the month came out OK. 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 verve 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 skepticism.

I stayed there by the window all night, keeping a sort of deathwatch. There were two more match-flares after the first, at about half-hour intervals. Nothing more after that. So possibly he was asleep over there. Possibly not I had to sleep some 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.

I said to get rid of Sam: “Go inside and smack a couple of eggs together.”

Boyne began in a galvanized-iron voice: “Jeff, what do you mean by doing anything like this to me? I’ve made a fool out of myself thanks to you. Sending my men out right and left on wild-goose chases. Thank God, I didn’t put my foot in it any worse than I did, and have this guy picked up and brought in for questioning.”

“Oh, then you don’t think that’s necessary?” I suggested, dryly.

The look he gave me took care of that. “I’m not alone in the department, you know. There are men over me I’m accountable to for my actions. That looks great, don’t it, sending one of my fellows one-half-a-day’s train ride up into the sticks to some God-forsaken whistle-stop or other at departmental expense—”

“Then you located the trunk?”

“We traced it through the express agency,” he said flintily.

“And you opened it?”

“We did better than that. We got in touch with the various farmhouses in the immediate locality, and Mrs. Thorwald came down to the junction in a produce-truck from one of them and opened it for him herself, with her own keys!”

Very few men have ever gotten a look from an old friend such as I got from him. At the door he said, stiff as a rifle barrel: “Just let’s forget all about it, shall we? That’s about the kindest thing either one of us can do for the other. You’re not yourself, and I’m out a little of my own pocket money, time and temper. Let’s let it go at that. If you want to telephone me in future I’ll be glad to give you my home number.”

The door went whopp! behind him.

For about ten minutes after he stormed out my numbed mind was in a sort of straitjacket. Then it started to wriggle its way free. The hell with the police. I can’t prove it to them, maybe, but I can prove it to myself, one way or the other, once and for all. Either I’m wrong or I’m right. He’s got his armor on against them. But his back is naked and unprotected against me.

I called Sam in. “Whatever became of that spyglass we used to have, when we were bumming around on that cabin-cruiser that season?”

He found it some place downstairs and came in with it, blowing on it and rubbing it along his sleeve. I let it lie idle in my lap first. I took a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote six words on it: What have you done with her?

I sealed it in an envelope and left the envelope blank. I said to Sam: “Now here’s what I want you to do, and I want you to be slick about it. You take this, go in that building 525, climb the stairs to the fourth-floor rear, and ease it under the door. You’re fast, at least you used to be. Let’s see if you’re fast enough to keep from being caught at it. Then when you get safely down again, give the outside doorbell a little poke, to attract attention.”

His mouth started to open.

“And don’t ask me any questions, you understand? I’m not fooling.”

He went, and I got the spyglass ready.

I got him in the right focus after a minute or two. A face leaped up, and I was really seeing him for the first time. Dark-haired, but unmistakable Scandinavian ancestry. Looked like a sinewy customer, although he didn’t run to much bulk.

About five minutes went by. His head turned sharply, profilewards. That was the bell-poke, right there. The note must be in already.

He gave me the back of his head as he went back toward the flat-door. The lens could follow him all the way to the rear, where my unaided eyes hadn’t been able to before.

He opened the door first, missed seeing it, looked out on a level. He closed it. Then dipped, straightened up. He had it. I could see him turning it this way and that.

He shifted in, away from the door, nearer the window. He thought danger lay near the door, safety away from it. He didn’t know it was the other way around, the deeper into his own rooms he retreated the greater the danger.

He’d torn it open, he was reading it. God, how I watched his expression. My eyes clung to it like leeches. There was a sudden widening, a pulling — the whole skin of his face seemed to stretch back behind the ears, narrowing his eyes to Mongoloids. Shock.

Panic. His hand pushed out and found the wall, and he braced himself with it. Then he went back toward the door again slowly. I could see him creeping up on it, stalking it as though it were something alive. He opened it so slenderly you couldn’t see it at all, peered fearfully through the crack. Then he closed it, and he came back, zigzag, off balance from sheer reflex dismay. He toppled into a chair and snatched up a drink. Out of the bottle neck itself this time. And even while he was holding it to his lips, his head was turned looking over his shoulder at the door that had suddenly thrown his secret in his face.

I put the glass down.

Guilty! Guilty as all hell, and the police be damned!

My hand started toward the phone, came back again. What was the use? They wouldn’t listen now any more than they had before. “You should have seen his face, etc.” And I could hear Boyne’s answer: “Anyone gets a jolt from an anonymous letter, true or false. You would yourself.” They had a real live Mrs. Thorwald to show me — or thought they had. I’d have to show them the dead one, to prove that they both weren’t one and the same. I, from my window, had to show them a body.

Well, he’d have to show me first.

It took hours before I got it. I kept pegging away at it, pegging away at it, while the afternoon wore away. Meanwhile he was pacing back and forth there like a caged panther. Two minds with but one thought, turned inside-out in my case. How to keep it hidden, how to see that it wasn’t kept hidden.

I was afraid he might try to light out, but if he intended doing that he was going to wait until after dark, apparently, so I had a little time yet— Possibly he didn’t want to himself, unless he was driven to it — still felt that it was more dangerous than to stay.

The customary sights and sounds around me went on unnoticed, while the main stream of my thoughts pounded like a torrent against that one obstacle stubbornly damming them up: how to get him to give the location away to me, so that I could give it away in turn to the police.

I was dimly conscious, I remember, of the landlord or somebody bringing in a prospective tenant to look at the sixth-floor apartment, the one that had already been finished. This was two over Thorwald’s; they were still at work on the in-between one. At one point an odd little bit of synchronization, completely accidental of course, cropped up. Landlord and tenant both happened to be near the living room windows on the sixth at the same moment that Thorwald was near those on the fourth. Both parties moved onward simultaneously into the kitchen from there, and, passing the blind spot of the wall, appeared next at the kitchen windows. It was uncanny, they were almost like precision-strollers or puppets manipulated on one and the same string. It probably wouldn’t have happened again just like that in another fifty years. Immediately afterwards they digressed, never to repeat themselves like that again.

The thing was, something about it had disturbed me. There had been some slight flaw or hitch to mar its smoothness. I tried for a moment or two to figure out what it had been, and couldn’t. The landlord and tenant had gone now, and only Thorwald was in sight. My unaided memory wasn’t enough to recapture it for me. My eyesight might have if it had been repeated, but it wasn’t.

It sank into my subconscious, to ferment there like yeast, while I went back to the main problem at hand.

I got it finally. It was well after dark, but I finally hit on a way. It mightn’t work, it was cumbersome and roundabout, but it was the only way I could think of. An alarmed turn of the head, a quick precautionary step in one certain direction, was all I needed. And to get this brief, flickering, transitory give-away, I needed two phone calls and an absence of about half an hour on his part between them.

I leafed a directory by matchlight until I’d found what I wanted: Thorwald, Lars. 525 Bndct... S Wansea 5-2114.

I blew out the match, picked up the phone in the dark. It was like television. I could see to the other end of my call, only not along the wire but by a direct channel of vision from window to window.

He said “Hullo?” gruffly.

I thought: How strange this is. I’ve been accusing him of murder for three days straight, and only now I’m hearing his voice for the first time.

I didn’t try to disguise my own voice. After all, he’d never see me and I’d never see him. I said: “You got my note?”

He said guardedly: “Who is this?”

“Just somebody who happens to know.”

He said craftily: “Know what?”

“Know what you know. You and I, we’re the only ones.”

He controlled himself well. I didn’t hear a sound. But he didn’t know he was open another way too. I had the glass balanced there at proper height on two large books on the sill. Through the window I saw him pull open the collar of his shirt as though its stricture was intolerable. Then he backed his hand over his eyes like you do when there’s a light blinding you.

His voice came back firmly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Business, that’s what I’m talking about. It should be worth something to me, shouldn’t it? To keep it from going any further.” I wanted to keep him from catching on that it was the windows. I still needed them, I needed them now more than ever. “You weren’t very careful about your door the other night. Or maybe the draft swung it open a little.”

That hit him where he lived. Even the stomach-heave reached me over the wire. “You didn’t see anything. There wasn’t anything to see.”

“That’s up to you. Why should I go to the police?” I coughed a little. “If it would pay me not to.”

“Oh,” he said. And there was relief of a sort in it. “D’you want to — see me? Is that it?”

“That would be the best way, wouldn’t it? How much can you bring with you for now?”

“I’ve only got about seventy dollars around here.”

“All right, then we can arrange the rest for later. Do you know where Lakeside Park is? I’m near there now. Suppose we make it there.” That was about thirty minutes away. Fifteen there and fifteen back. “There’s a little pavilion as you go in.”

“How many of you are there?” he asked cautiously.

“Just me. It pays to keep things to yourself. That way you don’t have to divvy up.”

He seemed to like that too. “I’ll take a run out,” he said, “just to see what it’s all about.”

I watched him more closely than ever, after he’d hung up. He flitted straight through to the end room, the bedroom, that he didn’t go near any more. He disappeared into a clothes-closet in there, stayed a minute, came out again. He must have taken something out of a hidden cranny or niche in there that even the dicks had missed. I could tell by the piston-like motion of his hand, just before it disappeared inside his coat, what it was. A gun.

It’s a good thing, I thought, I’m not out there in Lakeside Park waiting for my seventy dollars.

The place blacked and he was on his way.

I called Sam in. “I want you to do something for me that’s a little risky. In fact, damn risky. You might break a leg, or you might get shot, or you might even get pinched. We’ve been together ten years, and I wouldn’t ask you anything like that if I could do it myself. But I can’t, and it’s got to be done.” Then I told him. “Go out the back way, cross the back yard fences, and see if you can get into that fourth-floor flat up the fire escape. He’s left one of the windows down a little from the top.”

“What do you want me to look for?”

“Nothing.” The police had been there already, so what was the good of that? “There are three rooms over there. I want you to disturb everything just a little bit, in all three, to show someone’s been in there. Turn up the edge of each rug a little, shift every chair and table around a little, leave the closet doors standing out. Don’t pass up a thing. Here, keep your eyes on this.” I took off my own wrist watch, strapped it on him. “You’ve got twenty-five minutes, starting from now. If You stay within those twenty-five minutes, nothing will happen to you. When you see they’re up, don’t wait any longer, get out and get out fast.”

“Climb back down?”

“No.” He wouldn’t remember, in his excitement, if he’d left the windows up or not. And I didn’t want him to connect danger with the back of his place, but with the front — I wanted to keep my own window out of it. “Latch the window down tight, let yourself out the door, and beat it out of the building the front way, for your life!”

“I’m just an easy mark for you,” he said ruefully, but he went.

He came out through our own basement door below me, and scrambled over the fences. If anyone had challenged him from one of the surrounding windows, I was going to backstop for him, explain I’d sent him down to look for something. But no one did. He made it pretty good for anyone his age. He isn’t so young any more. Even the fire escape backing the flat, which was drawn up short, he managed to contact by standing up on something. He got in, lit the light, looked over at me. I motioned him to go ahead, not weaken.

I watched him at it. There wasn’t any way I could protect him, now that he was in there. Even Thorwald would be within his rights in shooting him down — this was break and entry. I had to stay in back behind the scenes, like I had been all along. I couldn’t get out in front of him as a lookout and shield him. Even the dicks had had a lookout posted.

He must have been tense, doing it. I was twice as tense, watching him do it. The twenty-five minutes took fifty to go by. Finally he came over to the window, latched it fast. The lights went, and he was out. He’d made it. I blew out a bellyful of breath that was twenty-five minutes old.

I heard him keying the street door, and when he came up I said warningly: “Leave the light out in here. Go and build yourself a great big two-story whisky punch; you’re as close to white as you’ll ever be.”

Thorwald came back twenty-nine minutes after he’d left for Lakeside Park. A pretty slim margin to hang a man’s life on. So now for the finale of the long-winded business, and here was hoping. I got my second phone call in before he had time to notice anything amiss. It was tricky timing but I’d been sitting there with the receiver ready in my hand, dialing the number over and over, then killing it each time. He came in on the 2 of 5-2114, and I saved that much time. The ring started before his hand came away from the light switch.

This was the one that was going to tell the story.

“You were supposed to bring money, not a gun; that’s why I didn’t show up.” I saw the jolt that threw him. The window still had to stay out of it. “I saw you tap the inside of your coat, where you had it, as you came out on the street” Maybe he hadn’t, but he wouldn’t remember by now whether he had or not. You usually do when you’re packing a gun and aren’t an habitual carrier.

“Too bad you had your trip out and back for nothing. I didn’t waste my time while you were gone, though. I know more now than I knew before.” This was the important part — I had the glass up and I was practically fluoroscoping him. “I’ve found out where — it is. You know what I mean. I know now where you’ve — got it. I was there while you were out.”

Not a word. Just quick breathing.

“Don’t you believe me? Look around. Put the receiver down and take a look for yourself. I found it.”

He put it down, moved as far as the living room entrance, and touched off the lights. He just looked around him once, in a sweeping, all-embracing stare, that didn’t come to a head on any one fixed point, didn’t center at all.

He was smiling grimly when he came back to the phone. All he said, softly and with malignant satisfaction, was: “You’re a liar.”

Then I saw him lay the receiver down and take his hand off it. I hung up at my end.

The test had failed. And yet it hadn’t— He hadn’t given the location away as I’d hoped he would. And yet that “You’re a liar” was a tacit admission that it was there to be found, somewhere around him, somewhere on those premises. In such a good place that he didn’t have to worry about it, didn’t even have to look to make sure.

So there was a kind of sterile victory in my defeat. But it wasn’t worth a damn to me.

He was standing there with his back to me, and I couldn’t see what he was doing. I knew the phone was somewhere in front of him, but I thought he was just standing there pensive behind it. His head was slightly lowered, that was all. I’d hung up at my end. I didn’t even see his elbow move. And if his index finger did, I couldn’t see it.

He stood like that a moment or two, then finally he moved aside. The lights went out over there; I lost him. He was careful not even to strike matches, like he sometimes did in the dark.

My mind no longer distracted by having him to look at, I turned to trying to recapture something else — that troublesome little hitch in synchronization that had occurred this afternoon, when the renting agent and he both moved simultaneously from one window to the next. The closest I could get was this: it was like when you’re looking at someone through a pane of imperfect glass, and a flaw in the glass distorts the symmetry of the reflected image for a second, until it has gone on past that point. Yet that wouldn’t do, that was not it. The windows had been open and there had been no glass between. And I hadn’t been using the lens at the time.

My phone rang. Boyne, I supposed. It wouldn’t be anyone else at this hour. Maybe, after reflecting on the way he’d jumped all over me — I said “Hello” unguardedly, in my own normal voice.

There wasn’t any answer.

I said: “Hello? Hello? Hello?” I kept giving away samples of my voice.

There wasn’t a sound from first to last—

I hung up finally. It was still dark over there, I noticed.

Sam looked in to check out. He was a bit thick-tongued from his restorative drink. He said something about “Awri’ if I go now?” I half heard him. I was trying to figure out another way of trapping him over there into giving away the right spot. I motioned my consent absently.

He went a little unsteadily down the stairs to the ground floor and after a delaying moment or two I heard the street door close after him. Poor Sam, he wasn’t much used to liquor.

I was left alone in the house, one chair the limit of my freedom of movement—

Suddenly a light went on over there again, just momentarily, to go right out again afterwards. He must have needed it for something, to locate something that he had already been looking for and found he wasn’t able to put his hands on readily without it. He found it, whatever it was, almost immediately, and moved back at once to put the lights out again. As he turned to do so, I saw him give a glance out the window. He didn’t come to the window to do it, he just shot it out in passing.

Something about it struck me as different from any of the others I’d seen him give in all the time Id been watching him. If you can qualify such an elusive thing as a glance, I would have termed it a glance with a purpose. It was certainly anything but vacant or random, it had a bright spark of fixity in it. It wasn’t one of those precautionary sweeps I’d seen him give, either. It hadn’t started over on the other side and worked its way around to my side, the right. It had hit dead-center at my bay window, for just a split second while it lasted, and then was gone again. And the lights were gone, and he was gone.

Sometimes your senses take things in without your mind translating them into their proper meaning. My eyes saw that look. My mind refused to smelter it properly. “It was meaningless,” I thought. “An unintentional bull’s-eye, that just happened to hit square over here, as he went toward the lights on his way out.”

Delayed action. A wordless ring of the phone. To test a voice? A period of bated darkness following that, in which two could have played at the same game — stalking one another’s window-squares, unseen. A last-moment flicker of the lights, that was bad strategy but unavoidable. A parting glance, radioactive with malignant intention. All these things sank in without fusing. My eyes did their job, it was my mind that didn’t — or at least took its time about it.

Seconds went by in packages of sixty. It was very still around the familiar quadrangle formed by the back of the houses. Sort of a breathless stillness. And then a sound came into it, starting up from nowhere, nothing. The unmistakable, spaced clicking a cricket makes in the silence of the night. I thought of Sam’s superstition about them, that he claimed had never failed to fulfill itself yet If that was the case, it looked bad for somebody in one of these slumbering houses around here—

Sam had been gone only about ten minutes. And now he was back again, he must have forgotten something. That drink was responsible. Maybe his hat, or maybe even the key to his own quarters uptown. He knew I couldn’t come down and let him in, and he was trying to be quiet about it, thinking perhaps I’d dozed off. All I could hear was this faint jiggling down at the lock of the front door. It was one of those old-fashioned stoop houses, with an outer pair of storm doors that were allowed to swing free all night, and then a small vestibule, and then the inner door, worked by a simple iron key. The liquor had made his hand a little unreliable, although he’d had this difficulty once or twice before, even without it. A match would have helped him find the keyhole quicker, but then, Sam doesn’t smoke. I knew he wasn’t likely to have one on him.

The sound had stopped now. He must have given up, gone away again, decided to let whatever it was go until tomorrow. He hadn’t gotten in, because I knew his noisy way of letting doors coast shut by themselves too well, and there hadn’t been any sound of that sort, that loose slap he always made.

Then suddenly it exploded. Why at this particular moment, I don’t know. That was some mystery of the inner workings of my own mind. It flashed like waiting gunpowder which a spark has finally reached along a slow train. Drove all thoughts of Sam, and the front door, and this and that completely out of my head. It had been waiting there since midafternoon today, and only now— More of that delayed action. Damn that delayed action.

The renting agent and Thorwald had both started even from the living room window. An intervening gap of blind wall, and both had reappeared at the kitchen window, still one above the other. But some sort of a hitch or flaw or jump had taken place, right there, that bothered me. The eye is a reliable surveyor. There wasn’t anything the matter with their timing, it was with their parallel-ness, or whatever the word is. The hitch had been vertical, not horizontal. There had been an upward “jump.”

Now I had it, now I knew. And it couldn’t wait—

It was too good. They wanted a body? Now I had one for them.

Sore or not, Boyne would have to listen to me now. I didn’t waste any time, I dialed his precinct — house then and there in the dark, working the slots in my lap by memory alone. They didn’t make much noise going around, just a light click. Not even as distinct as that cricket out there—

“He went home long ago,” the desk sergeant said.

This couldn’t wait. “All right, give me his home phone number.”

He took a minute, came back again. “Trafalgar,” he said. Then nothing more.

“Well? Trafalgar what?” Not a sound.

“Hello? Hello?” I tapped it. “Operator, I’ve been cut off. Give me that party again.” I couldn’t get her either.

I hadn’t been cut off. My wire had been cut. That had been too sudden, right in the middle of— And to be cut like that it would have to be done somewhere right here inside the house with me. Outside it went underground.

Delayed action. This time final, fatal, altogether too late. A voiceless ring of the phone. A direction-finder of a look from over there. “Sam” seemingly trying to get back in a while ago.

Suddenly, death was somewhere inside the house here with me. And I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get up out of this chair. Even if I had gotten through to Boyne just now, that would have been too late. There wasn’t time enough now for one of those camera-finishes in this. I could have shouted out the window to that gallery of sleeping rear-window neighbors around me, I supposed. It would have brought them to the windows. It couldn’t have brought them over here in time. By the time they had even figured which particular house it was coming from, it would stop again, be over with, I didn’t open my mouth. Not because I was brave, but because it was so obviously useless.

He’d be up in a minute. He must be on the stairs now, although I couldn’t hear him. Not even a creak. A creak would have been a relief, would have placed him. This was like being shut up in the dark with the silence of a gliding, coiling cobra somewhere around you.

There wasn’t a weapon in the place with me. There were books there on the wall, in the dark, within reach. Me, who never read. The former owner’s books. There was a bust of Rousseau or Montesquieu, I’d never been able to decide which, one of those gents with flowing manes, topping them. It was a monstrosity, bisque clay, but it too dated from before my occupancy.

I arched my middle upward from the chair seat and clawed desperately up at it. Twice my fingertips slipped off it, then at the third raking I got it to teeter, and the fourth brought it down into my lap, pushing me down into the chair. There was a steamer rug under me. I didn’t need it around me in this weather, I’d been using it to soften the seat of the chair. I tugged it out from under and mantled it around me like an Indian brave’s blanket. Then I squirmed far down in the chair, let my head and one shoulder dangle out over the arm, on the side next to the wall. I hoisted the bust to my other, upward shoulder, balanced it there precariously for a second head, blanket tucked around its ears. From the back, in the dark, it would look — I hoped—

I proceeded to breathe adenoidally, like someone in heavy upright sleep. It wasn’t hard. My own breath was coming nearly that labored anyway, from tension.

He was good with knobs and hinges and things. I never heard the door open, and this one, unlike the one downstairs, was right behind me. A little eddy of air puffed through the dark at me. I could feel it because my scalp, the real one, was all wet at the roots of the hair right then.

If it was going to be a knife or head-blow, the dodge might give me a second chance, that was the most I could hope for, I knew. My arms and shoulders are hefty. I’d bring him down on me in a bear-hug after the first slash or drive, and break his neck or collarbone against me. If it was going to be a gun, he’d get me anyway in the end. A difference of a few seconds. He had a gun, I knew, that he was going to use on me in the open, over at Lakeside Park. I was hoping that here, indoors, in order to make his own escape more practicable—

Time was up.

The flash of the shot lit up the room for a second, it was so dark. Or at least the corners of it, like flickering, weak lightning. The bust bounced on my shoulder and disintegrated into chunks.

I thought he was jumping up and down on the floor for a minute with frustrated rage. Then when I saw him dart by me and lean over the window sill to look for a way out, the sound transferred itself rearwards and downwards, became a pummeling with hoof and hip at the street door. The camera-finish after all. But he still could have killed me five times.

I flung my body down into the narrow crevice between chair arm and wall, but my legs were still up, and so was my head and that one shoulder.

He whirled, fired at me so close that it was like looking at sunrise in the face. I didn’t feel it, so — it hadn’t hit.

“You—” I heard him grunt to himself. I think it was the last thing he said. The rest of his life was all action, not verbal.

He flung over the sill on one arm and dropped into the yard. Two-story drop. He made it because he missed the cement, landed on the sod-strip in the middle. I jacked myself up over the chair arm and flung myself bodily forward at the window, neatly hitting it chin first.

He went all right. When life depends on it, you go. He took the first fence, rolled over that bellywards. He went over the second like a cat, hands and feet pointed together in a spring. Then he was back in the rear yard of his own building. He got up on something, just about like Sam had— The rest was all footwork, with quick little corkscrew twists at each landing stage. Sam had latched his windows down when he was over there, but he’d reopened one of them for ventilation on his return. His whole life depended now on that casual, unthinking little act—

Second, third. He was up to his own windows. He’d made it. Something went wrong. He veered out away from them in another pretzel-twist — flashed up toward the fifth, the one above. Something sparked in the darkness of one of his own windows where he’d been just now, and a shot thudded heavily out around the quadrangle-enclosure like a big bass drum.

He passed the fifth, the sixth, got to the roof. He’d made it a second time. Gee, he loved life! The guys in his own windows couldn’t get him, he was over them in a straight line and there was too much fire escape interlacing in the way.

I was too busy watching him to watch what was going on around me. Suddenly Boyne was next to me, sighting. I heard him mutter: “I almost hate to do this, he’s got to fall so far.”

He was balanced on the roof parapet up there, with a star right over his head. An unlucky star. He stayed a minute too long, trying to kill before he was killed. Or maybe he was killed, and knew it.

A shot cracked, high up against the sky, the window pane flew apart all over the two of us, and one of the books snapped right behind me.

Boyne didn’t say anything more about hating to do it. My face was pressing outward against his arm. The recoil of his elbow jarred my teeth. I blew a clearing through the smoke to watch him go.

It was pretty horrible. He took a minute to show anything, standing up there on the parapet. Then he let his gun go, as if to say: “I won’t need this any more.” Then he went after it. He missed the fire escape entirely, came all the way down on the outside. He landed so far out he hit one of the projecting planks, down there out of sight. It bounced his body up, like a springboard. Then it landed again — for good. And that was all.

I said to Boyne: “I got it. I got it finally. The fifth-floor flat, the one over his, that they’re still working on. The cement kitchen floor, raised above the level of the other rooms. They wanted to comply with the fire laws and also obtain a dropped living room effect, as cheaply as possible. Dig it up—”

He went right over then and there, down through the basement and over the fences, to save time. The electricity wasn’t turned on yet in that one, they had to use their torches. It didn’t take them long at that, once they’d got started. In about half an hour he came to the window and wigwagged over for my benefit. It meant yes.

He didn’t come over until nearly eight in the morning; after they’d tidied up and taken them away. Both away, the hot dead and the cold dead. He said: “Jeff, I take it all back. That damn fool that I sent up there about the trunk-well, it wasn’t his fault, in a way. I’m to blame. He didn’t have orders to check on the woman’s description, only on the contents of the trunk. He came back and touched on it in a general way. I go home and I’m in bed already, and suddenly pop! into my brain — one of the tenants I questioned two whole days ago had given us a few details and they didn’t tally with his on several important points. Talk about being slow to catch on!”

“I’ve had that all the way through this damn thing,” I admitted ruefully. “I called it delayed action. It nearly killed me.”

“I’m a police officer and you’re not.”

“That how you happened to shine at the right time?”

“Sure. We came over to pick him up for questioning. I left them planted there when we saw he wasn’t in, and came on over here by myself to square it up with you while we were waiting. How did you happen to hit on that cement floor?”

I told him about the freak synchronization. “The renting agent showed up taller at the kitchen window in proportion to Thorwald, than he had been a moment before when both were at the living room windows together. It was no secret that they were putting in cement floors, topped by a cork composition, and raising them considerably. But it took on new meaning. Since the top floor one has been finished for some time, it had to be the fifth. Here’s the way I have it lined up, just in theory. She’s been in ill health for years, and he’s been out of work, and he got sick of that and of her both. Met this other—”

“She’ll be here later today, they’re bringing her down under arrest.

“He probably insured her for all he could get, and then started to poison her slowly, trying not to leave any trace. I imagine — and remember, this is pure conjecture — she caught him at it that night the light was on all night. Caught on in some way, or caught him in the act. He lost his head, and did the very thing he had wanted all along to avoid doing. Killed her by violence — strangulation or a blow. The rest had to be hastily improvised. He got a better break than he deserved at that. He thought of the apartment upstairs, went up and looked around. They’d just finished laying the floor, the cement hadn’t hardened Yet, and the materials were still around. He gouged a trough out of it just wide enough to take her body, put her in it, mixed fresh cement and recemented over her, possibly raising the general level of the floor an inch or two so that she’d be safely covered. A permanent, odorless coffin. Next day the workmen came back, laid down the cork surfacing on top of it without noticing anything, I suppose held used one of their own trowels to smooth it. Then he sent his accessory upstate fast, near where his wife had been several summers before, but to a different farmhouse where she wouldn’t be recognized, along with the trunk keys. Sent the trunk up after her, and dropped himself an already used post card into his mailbox, with the year-date blurred. In a week or two she would have probably committed ‘suicide’ up there as Mrs. Anna Thorwald. Despondency due to ill health. Written him a farewell note and left her clothes beside some body of deep water. It was risky, but they might have succeeded in collecting the insurance at that.”

By nine Boyne and the rest had gone. I was still sitting there in the chair, too keyed up to sleep. Sam came in and said: “Here’s Doc Preston.”

He showed up rubbing his hands, in that way he has. “Guess we can take that cast off your leg now. You must be tired of sitting there all day doing nothing.”