Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 6, No. 12, December 1961

A Matter of Acoustics by Georges Carousso

Walls have ears is an old saying, familiar long before the modern inventions of wired walls; or furniture, or tapped telephone wires; in fact, long before telephones were invented. It is true in this tale, otherwise modern in its circumstances and setting.

Those old saws people use about “Crime doesn’t pay”, “Murder will find you out”, and “There’s no such thing as a perfect crime”, have always handed me a laugh. I don’t have to sound cynical; it’s just that I’ve had too much proof to the contrary.

I’ve been an illustrator for a news syndicate for a long time and, because I have the perfectionist’s knack for details, one of my assignments has been to sketch courtroom scenes where photographers aren’t allowed. You don’t have to sit through too many cases before it becomes quite obvious that crime is a darn profitable business. About the only reasons why murders are solved are, because somebody squeals on the murderer, the murderer squeals on himself — psychiatrists call that “a subconscious desire for punishment” — or the murderer takes so many elaborate precautions to cover himself up, that he leaves a trail a mile wide.

The perfect crime has to be simple; no fancy murder methods, no complex alibis, no obvious motives. Like the murder of Sam Berringer. That was about as perfect as murder can ever be. The police still don’t realize how perfect it really was.

Somebody killed Sam by firing one shot into his heart from a .25 caliber automatic. That much the police could tell by examining the body and the small, but effective bullet. The rest was a complete blank. No fingerprints, no obvious motive, no suspect with an alibi.

When the police finally admitted that it was a perfect crime, my syndicate decided to wrap up the story by doing a Sunday feature on perfect crimes, including this one. My editor called me in and handed me the assignment to illustrate it.

“Why me?” I asked. “I’m over my ears in work right now.”

“You lived in the same apartment building as the Berringers, didn’t you?” he asked. “You must have seen both him and his wife around the place.”

“Sure. Passed them in the hall a few times. Always nodded. We’re real polite people in Greenwich Village. But I never met them socially.”

“You never met the characters in the other perfect crimes socially either,” he said. “So that makes you eligible. Now, the layout I had in mind...”

That’s how editors think. Of course, there was no point in my telling him that even though I had never met the Berringers socially, I knew quite a bit about both Sam and his wife, Elise. Knowing about them was due to an acoustical freak in the construction of the reconverted apartment. It was one of those old buildings that had been ripped apart and modernized, and when it was, something happened to the acoustics in the place. You probably know about the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and how the acoustics are so perfect you can hear a pin drop way off in the distance? Well, by some construction quirk, the acoustics in my apartment worked the same way. Not through the whole flat. Just in one closet. From that closet, I could hear perfectly everything that went on in the apartment on the floor above me and diagonally across the hall. The Berringers lived there. In fact, they had moved from my flat to the bigger one above just before I rented my place.

I found out about the acoustics of that closet by accident. I was stowing away some of the real arty canvases I had painted before I turned commercial, when I heard the woman upstairs singing. Her husky voice came to me as clearly as if she was in that dark closet with me. It was a weird intimate sensation.

I did a lot of special assignment work, and worked home most of the time, and I found that if I put my drafting table in a certain spot and sat with my back to the open closet, I could hear every word that passed between the Berringers as clearly as if they were in the room with me. Call it eavesdropping, if you wish, but I was lonesome. Having voices in the room with me while I worked made the place feel less empty. Naturally, I never mentioned it to anyone or complained about it to the management.

By that acoustical freak, you might say that I knew the Berringers better than any one else in New York. They were from Texas, and they had made no friends, which was no surprise. Sam Berringer was a stinker.

He was one of those thin, blond, spoiled guys, with a surly mouth that made him look pretty instead of handsome. Apparently his family was rolling in oil and he was an only son. But his old man had kicked him out of the plush-lined nest so he could prove whether or not he was man enough to stand on his own two feet, and eventually manage the family fortune. Sam met the challenge by marrying Elise and letting her support him. Somewhere along the line, he also conceived the idea that he was a poet, and that someday, when inspiration knocked at his door, he would write a great epic.

All this came out little by little, when Sam had too much bourbon, or just naturally felt sorry for himself, and raved and ranted about his cruel, cruel fate.

Elise was as uncomplaining and quiet as he was whining and noisy. She was a beautiful creature, with large, luminous, dark eyes, and a pale, ethereal complexion. I could see how a “poet” would go for her, and think of her in terms of “cool zephyrs”, “diaphanous gossamer”, and junk like that. For all her seeming coolness, there was something about her that suggested deep-smouldering embers; embers that would blaze to white fire if the right breeze — meaning, the right person — caressed them. I think what first gave me that impression was the way she moved; with the sinuous grace of a cat.

Naturally, we nodded when we met in the hall, and a few times we exchanged such inane remarks as:

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Terribly. But I like the heat.”

No. That isn’t quite accurate. We did speak once. It was after I had been in my apartment about two weeks. She knocked at my door and when I opened it, she said, “I’m Mrs. Berringer from the floor above. We had this flat for a few months, and I thought I’d tell you that the defrost button on the refrigerator doesn’t work. The only way to defrost, is leave the door open a bit, and keep emptying the drip tray.”

It was a lame excuse for knocking at my door, but when I asked her to come in, she refused. Yet, before she left, her eyes passed quickly over the room and I noticed them flicker when she saw the open closet door behind my drafting table. In spite of the sketches lying around, she didn’t even make the usual comment, “Oh, I see you’re an artist.” As if she didn’t care, or, as if she already knew. She just glanced around the room and walked out. But that flicker of her eyes was unmistakable. She knew the secret of that closet.

I became positive of it as I listened to the conversations above me in the evenings that followed. She was no longer talking only to Sam. Her voice would change just a trifle and she would be talking to me, drawing Sam out for my benefit. It was then that I found out about Sam and his wealthy parents. It was then that I found that since he didn’t have his father to support him and his mother to coddle him, he had married Elise to do those things for him.

It burned me up that a girl like her should be willing to stick to a pale worm like Sam and support him while he sat around looking at ball games on TV, drinking bourbon and waiting for inspiration. I had the feeling that Elise was trying to tell me the reason why she stuck to him through the choice of words in her conversation. A few times I thought I had it, but I couldn’t be certain.

“You’ll write your epic,” she said one night. “I know you will. You’re the greatest living poet. You’ll write it, and then you’ll be a success and we’ll both be able to go back to your home.”

“How can I work, being cooped up in this lousy dump?” he accused her as if it wasn’t she who was paying the rent. “I had servants all my life... a big house... comfort... trees outside my window. Trees... That’s it! That’s what I need; trees. We could have trees if we could get a house in Westchester. Isn’t it time they gave you a promotion at the bank?”

“I’m a secretary,” she said. “Not an executive.”

“If there’s no future at the bank, why don’t you find something else? You’re capable of bigger things.”

“I’ll try, dear,” she said lightly. Then her voice took that odd tone she used when she was talking also to me. “Even you might be surprised at the things I’m capable of.”

She came in a few nights later all excited.

“I’ve been offered a job as an assistant buyer with a department store,” she told him. “It’ll mean some travel, but you could manage alone and...”

“No!” he shouted. “I know all about buyers and salesmen on the road. Drinking and carousing around and raising hell, and...”

“I don’t drink and I don’t carouse,” she said and there was such repressed white fire in her voice that I put down my pencil and pushed my stool back nearer to the closet. “Sometimes I wish I did. Believe me, if I found the right man...”

I heard him laugh uncertainly, frightened by her anger.

“Now you’re talking silly,” he said. “You’re not the type.”

Brother! How little you know! I wanted to say. You just give me a week with your beautiful, smouldering Elise...

Thinking of the cat-grace of her body, I missed a good bit of what followed upstairs. When I became conscious of their voices again, Sam had started feeling damn sorry for himself and his voice was filled with tears. Elise said, “Poor Sam. Poor baby. Everything will be all right. Everything.” Her voice was soft and warm. Like a purr. I slammed my pencil down and went out for a drink.

But that incident affected both Sam and me. I kept thinking, “A week with smouldering Elise...” and Sam got to brooding about Elise “carousing around” as he called it.

He went into jealous tantrums. From that day on, she couldn’t be five minutes late coming home from work, without Sam putting her through a third degree. Where did she have lunch? With whom? Did anyone try to pick her up on the bus?

He even accused her of flirting with Mr. Tenelli, the grocery man, who had a fat wife and nine kids.

When she got tired of listening to his tirades, Elise would walk out, and go and sit on the front stoop and smoke a cigarette. I made a point of meeting her in the hall a few times when she was coming down, but she just nodded and walked by. Well, no. Not quite. Always, her eyes clung to mine for an infinitesimal fraction of a second too long.

One night, she told him that she was going out to mail a letter to his folks, and he stopped her.

“What are you writing to them all the time?” he wanted to know.

“I just write to tell them how wonderful you are,” she said.

But he forced her to give him the letter and he tore it open — I could actually hear the paper tearing, with those fantastic acoustics — and he read it out loud. And sure enough, it was a letter telling his parents how wonderful he was, and for them not to worry because she loved their son so much and was trying to take such good care of him.

“Hm...” he said. “I guess it’s all right. I’m sorry...”

He sounded pleased; as pleased as a child that has been patted on the head. But I felt shivers running up and down my spine and was goose-flesh all over. The letter told how wonderful he was, all right, but there was something in its wording, in its careful exaggeration, that reminded me of only one thing. An obituary.

Then, one night, they had an argument, and he slapped her. I don’t remember what the argument was about. To hear that slap, and her startled cry, seemed to make my mind go suddenly blank.

“I could kill you,” she said softly. Then, as if she found the wording inadequate, she repeated even more softly, “If I were a man, I would kill you.”

I listened for a few moments, but there was no other sound from upstairs and I snapped off my light and went out.

I met Elise coming down the stairs. She turned her face, as if to hide the red mark on her cheek from me, and passed by me.

I caught up with her in the hall.

“You look like you need a drink,” I said.

She turned and looked at me, and the smouldering glow of her anger seemed to make her eyes even more luminous.

“I just might,” she said. “I just might.”

Then a veil seemed to cover the glow and the anger and she glanced up the stairs and smiled. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. She had small teeth. So small, that in that dim light, they seemed almost as if they were pointed.

“But, really, no,” she said. “I’ll just sit out on the stoop for a while.”

“Some other time?”

She looked at me for that fraction of a second too long, that fraction of time that is the most important in all eternity, and I felt something inside of me tremble.

“Of course,” she said softly.

She came to me that night. I’m quite sure of it. I know it sounds ridiculous to have doubts about a thing like that, and yet, there are times when I do. I’m sure you’ll understand. Didn’t you ever have a dream so real that you were certain it was reality... or experience moments of reality so unreal that you were certain they were part of a dream? It was like that with me. I think the reason for it was the darkness. The utter and complete darkness.

The sound of the key in the lock woke me. I remember that I was not surprised, as if I had been lying half-awake, expecting it. With that thin metallic sound, complete and instantaneous awareness flowed through me. I felt things in a flash so rapid that there was no time nor need to think in words. I knew that it was Elise... that she had kept the key to my apartment... that she was using it... that each night, for many nights, I had lain half-awake waiting for her to use it.

It was dark in my room. I turned over on my side and reached for the lamp. A voice whispered.

“Please... no light...” A whisper is not a voice. It has no identity. It is nothing.

My room faces an alley and a blank wall. It was dark. More than dark. I did not know whether my eyes were open or shut. I listened, and for a few moments, I heard faint rustling, then it stopped and my sense of hearing disappeared too.

I felt her there in the room, as a blind man must feel the presence of his beloved. I felt her through every naked nerve of my body, through every vibrant desire. I felt her with my whole being, no longer hampered by sight and the reality of sight, nor hearing and the reality of hearing. In that complete blackness, I closed my eyes better to see the alabaster glow. I felt its warmth long, long before I touched it.

And even then, she used darkness. She used it to hide in, to tease me, to draw me groping after her. In that sightless and soundless void, we were as lovers in the sunlight, and sometimes she ran from me with silent laughter and hid in a forest, and sometimes she let the waves of the sea carry her deep beyond my reach... but never for long... never forever.

In that empty nothingness of blind space, I found the greatest fulfillment I have ever known.

I remember the weight of her head against my shoulder, the scent of her hair, the warm stirring of her breath against my throat. The last thing I remember was thinking that soon it would be dawn and I would see her.

I was alone when I woke.

It was three days later that Sam Berringer was murdered.

Elise had to work late at the bank “clipping coupons”, whatever that was. She came home and prepared Sam’s supper, because he claimed he couldn’t boil water without burning it, and like a petulant child he did everything to delay her leaving him. He had a headache, he said... he didn’t feel hungry... maybe if they had a cocktail before dinner, it would give him an appetite...

“You know I don’t like cocktails,” she said, but Sam went ahead and mixed them anyway. He was still fussing over his dinner when she got up and left him to go back to the bank. I heard him slam his fork down on the table in his peeve.

An hour later, someone knocked on Sam’s door, interrupting the final inning of the twilight game he was watching on TV. When Sam opened the door, someone pressed the muzzle of a .25 caliber automatic against his heart and pulled the trigger. A few of the tenants heard the muffled shot. Most of them mistook it for another one of the hundreds of shots fired each evening on the kid’s TV programs, but somebody finally called the superintendent just in case. The super saw blood seeping out from underneath Berringers’ door and called the police.

That’s about all there was to it. The police swarmed all over the place for a while, going over the Berringers’ apartment with a fine tooth comb, but they found nothing. They questioned all the tenants — and found nothing. Some of us had heard the shot, and some had not. Some knew the Berringers by sight, as I did, but no one knew them intimately, or had exchanged visits with them.

The cops picked up Elise at the bank and brought her home. All she could do was sob, “Why would anyone want to kill Sam? He didn’t know a soul in New York. He was a poet. He wasn’t interested in people. He wasn’t interested in anybody...”

And that was that. No clues. No motives. No nothing. The perfect crime.

Two things did happen in the weeks that followed that may be of interest to you. They certainly were very disturbing to me.

The first was that Sam’s mother and father came from Texas and stayed in the apartment with Elise, to comfort her in her sorrow. That, of course, prevented me from seeing her alone and doing a bit of comforting of my own. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went up to their apartment... to express my sympathies.

Elise met me at the door. The black she wore accentuated the cool, pale alabaster of her skin. Her eyes were luminous, but expressionless.

“It’s one of the neighbors,” she said over her shoulder to the old couple sitting inside. “Mister... Mister...”

“Drake,” I said. “Steve Drake. I live downstairs.”

I sat for about five minutes listening to the old folks tell me how wonderful Sam had been, and how wonderful Elise had been to him.

“We lost a son,” Mrs. Berringer said tearfully patting Elise’s hand. “But we have a wonderful daughter now.”

The old man sniffed and nodded.

I got out of there as soon as I could. Elise walked me to the door.

“It was kind of you to come,” she said. “Thank you... for everything.”

She looked at me for that one fraction of a second too long, then one of her eyelids flickered in a shutter-quick wink.

She left for Texas with her new “parents” two days later. She left me no message. Nothing.

I hadn’t expected that. I refused to accept what my instinct told me. I was still trying to figure it out, when my editor tossed me the job of illustrating the Sunday feature on perfect crimes. I couldn’t turn him down.

I did the illustrations absent-mindedly, trusting my years as a professional and my natural zeal for accuracy to stand by me until the job was done. I got the backgrounds for some of my drawings from old police pictures we had in our morgue. The rest I filled in as best I could from the imaginary reconstructions of the unsolved crimes. The editor liked the job. He thought my illustration of the Berringer case was one of the most perfect I had ever turned out.

It was.

I didn’t realize how perfect until I came out of my daze long enough one Sunday morning to see my illustrations in print. By that time, the editions had hit the stands. Millions of them. People all over the country were looking at my illustrations. You probably were one of them. You, of course, had no way of knowing that, in my unconscious zeal for artistic accuracy, I had made some very serious mistakes in one of them. It was in the one of the Berringer murder.

The illustration showed Sam Berringer standing in the doorway of his apartment. He looked every bit the poet with the smoking jacket he was wearing and the highball in his hand. In back of him was the room, perfect in every detail to the two cocktail glasses, the bottle of bourbon on the table and the ball game on the TV set. There wasn’t much shown of the murderer. Just his back, and the hand holding the small automatic beneath Sam’s heart.

You, and the millions of others who were looking at the illustrations at the same time that I was, could have noticed nothing wrong with these details. But then, you could not have known that the ball game was over by the time the body was discovered. For that matter, you could not have known that Sam was holding a highball glass in his hand when he was shot, or about those two cocktail glasses or about...

Of course you could not have known. Only the police — and I — knew those things.

So you see, like I told you at the beginning, those old saws about crime not paying and there being no perfect murders are just the bunk. This perfect crime paid plenty.

Sure, I’ll probably get the chair for killing Sam Berringer. But it’s like I told you... The only criminals who get caught are the ones who get over-elaborate — which I didn’t, get squealed on — which I was not, or squeal on themselves out of the subconscious desire to be punished. I suppose that’s what I did when I let a few million newspapers publish what amounted to a confession... I confessed.

But Sam Berringer’s real murderer will never get punished. Elise didn’t make any of these mistakes. She’s in Texas now, playing the role of doting daughter to the Berringer fortune.

Of course, Elise may get tired of waiting for the old folks to die — and people in Texas sometimes take a long time dying — and she might help them a bit in the process. If she does, I don’t doubt that she’ll try to find someone to do the helping for her — someone who’s real lonely and in his loneliness dreams big dreams of alabaster turned to white fire. If she finds someone like that, she’ll look at him with the promise of that fraction of a second that in all eternity seems the longest, then she’ll move away with the grace of a cat... and wait.

Only, I don’t think she’ll ever find acoustics as perfect as those that connected her apartment with my closet. She might get impatient. And she might try something more elaborate...