Bats Fly at Dusk

Chapter XVII

The 1600 block on Fairmead Avenue, the address the blind man had given Bertha, was sparsely settled, being well on the outskirts of current real-estate development.

Conditions of the dim-out made it necessary for the cab driver to grope his way, pausing frequently to consult a map which he took from his pocket.

“This should be close to it,” he said. “Somewhere on the other side of the street and a little past the middle of the block.”

“Let me out here,” Bertha said. “I can find it better on foot than we can by prowling around.”

“But it’s more convenient to look for it this way, ma’am.”

“And more expensive,” Bertha snapped. “Let me out.”

The cab driver slid the vehicle to a stop, jumped out, and held the door open for Bertha Cool.

“Watch your step now, ma’am.”

From her purse Bertha took a small flashlight which cast its beam through a deep purple lens. “I’m all right. Be sure to wait for me,” she said, switching on the flashlight. She walked down the block, peering at numbers, and found 1672 to be a typical bungalow, set well back from the road.

The walk which led to the bungalow was of cement with a little iron guide rail on the right-hand side, and the inside of this rail was worn to a polish from being rubbed with the blind man’s cane as he journeyed back and forth to his little house.

Bertha climbed the two wooden steps to the front porch and pressed the bell button. She heard the sharp clatter as the bell jangled on the inside of the house. The sound was unexpectedly loud.

It was then Bertha noticed, for the first time, that the door was blocked partially open by rubber wedges which held it in. such a position there was a crack eight or ten inches wide. It was, she realized, because this door was partially open that the bell in the interior of the house had sounded so loud.

Bertha stepped to the doorway, called, “Hello. Is anyone at home?” There was no answer.

Bertha kicked out one of the door stops, groped inside for a light switch, found it, and clicked the switch on.

Nothing happened. The room remained in absolute, utter darkness.

Bertha Cool turned the dim, purple light from her flashlight toward the ceiling of the room. It showed a chandelier hanging down from the ceiling with a cluster of sockets for light globes. But there wasn’t so much as a single light globe in the place.

Puzzled, Bertha swung the beam of her flashlight, and then suddenly the solution dawned upon her. A blind man had no need for electric lights.

Bertha stepped inside the house, sending the beam of her flashlight around the room. She called once, “This is Mrs. Cool. Isn’t anybody home?”

She sensed motion somewhere in the darkness. A huge, formless shadow appeared on the ceiling, slid silently across it and vanished. Bertha jumped back. Something fluttered close to her face; then, without sound, an object settled against her neck.

Bertha flung up her arm, kicked out viciously. In a rage that was born of terror, she screamed a lusty oath.

Abruptly, the thing left her. For a moment it was caught in the unreal light in her flashlight — a bat with outstretched wings, a bat which sent its shadow projected against the far wall, making the animal seem monstrously big, bizarre, and wicked.

“Pickle me for a herring!” Bertha exclaimed, and then struck viciously at the bat, which eluded her effortlessly and glided out into the darkness.

It was a full ten seconds before Bertha could get her pulse under control and start examining the front room of the house.

Satisfied that the room was empty, she turned back toward the porch, guided by the unreal faint illumination which sprayed out from her pocket flashlight.

It was then she noticed for the first time a jet-black streak running across the floor. At first glance she thought this was merely a stain on the carpet. Then, with another pounding of her heart, she realized that it was some sort of liquid — a little pool of the liquid, then a smear, a zigzag path, another pool, a smear, a zigzag path. It was just as the nature of this sinister track dawned upon her that Bertha Cool discovered the body.

It was sprawled face down over near a window on the far side of the room. Apparently, the man had been shot while standing near the door, and had crawled a few inches at a time, and with frequent stops trying to gather the strength which was oozing out of him even as he waited — until finally, a pause to gather strength just under the window had been long enough to let that last pool of red mark the end of the struggle with a grim period — a period which showed black as ink in the violet light thrown by Bertha Cool’s spotlight.

Abruptly, the possible significance of the open door and of the silent house dawned on Bertha Cool. She recognized the distinct possibility that a murderer was concealed in one of the other rooms, hoping to avoid detection, but ready to shoot his way out should he be discovered. The place was wrapped in Stygian darkness interspersed only by such eerie illumination as came from the flashlight Bertha Cool held in her hand. And this flashlight, designed to be used during a complete blackout, cast no well-defined beam which furnished a sharp illumination. Rather, it dissolved an indeterminate area of dense darkness into a half-darkness, showing objects with sufficient clarity to enable one to avoid stumbling over them. But there was no assurance that it penetrated the shadows in which a murderer might be lurking.

Bertha Cool started with grim competency toward the door. Her foot tangled in a thin wire, jerked some object sharply, and sent it clattering. Bertha’s flashlight swung down, showing a tripod with a small gauge shotgun lashed in position, the wire running to the trigger. Bertha’s march became a retreat, then a rout. The wooden porch of the building echoed to her fleeing steps, and the flashlight bobbed and weaved in her hand as she ran down the walk.

The cab driver had turned out his headlights, and Bertha knew only that the cab should be somewhere down the street. She kept looking back over her shoulder as she ran down the sidewalk.

Abruptly the parking lights of the taxicab snapped on. The cab driver, looking at her curiously, said, “All finished?”

Bertha didn’t want to talk just then. She dived into the security of the taxicab, and slammed the door. The body lurched as the driver slid in behind the wheel started the motor, and spun the car in a U-turn.

“No, no,” Bertha said.

He turned to look back at her curiously.

“There’s — I must get the police.”

“What’s the matter?”

“A man’s dead in that house.”

The curiosity in the eyes of the cab driver suddenly gave place to a cold appraisal, a calculating suspicion. He looked down at the glint of metal in Bertha Cool’s right hand.

Bertha nervously shoved her flashlight back into her purse. “The nearest telephone,” she said, “and don’t stare at me like that.”

The cab went through the gears into rapid motion, but Bertha realized that the driver kept watching her in the rearview mirror which he had surreptitiously adjusted so that it showed her every motion. When they came to a drugstore, the cab driver didn’t let her go in alone to telephone, but followed her, standing at her elbow while she notified police headquarters and waiting with her until they heard the reassuring siren of the police car.

Sergeant Frank Sellers was in the car, and Bertha knew Frank Sellers slightly by previous meetings and largely by reputation. Sergeant Sellers didn’t care particularly for private detectives. His entire approach to a police problem was that of frank skepticism. As a colleague had once expressed it to Bertha, “He just looks at you and chews his cigar. His eyes call you a damn liar, but he doesn’t say anything. Hell’s bells, he don’t have to.”

Sergeant Sellers seemed in no great rush to get started for the scene of the crime. He seemed more anxious to get Bertha’s story down to the last detail.

“Now, let’s get this straight,” he said, chewing his cigar over to a corner of his mouth. “You went out there to see this blind man. That right?”

“Yes.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes.”

“He’d been to you and hired you to do a job?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d done it?”

“Yes.”

“Then what did you want to see him about?”

That question caught Bertha slightly off guard. She said, “It was another matter.”

“What?”

“I wanted to checkup with him on some of the angles.”

“You’d already done what he hired you to?”

“Yes — in a way.”

“Well, what does that mean? What hadn’t you done?”

“I’d done everything he wanted. There was something on which I wanted his assistance, something on which I wanted him to check up.”

“I see,” Sellers said with ponderous disbelief. “You wanted a blind man to help you on some of your problems, is that it?”

“I wanted to see the man,” Bertha Cool said, getting back some of her customary belligerency, “and I’m not going to tell you what I wanted to see him about. It’s an entirely different case, and I can’t afford to tip my hand on it. Now, does that clear things up?”

“Very definitely,” Sergeant Sellers said, as though Bertha Cool’s statement made her definitely the number one suspect in the case. “And this blind man was lying there dead, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Face down you say?”

“Yes.”

“He’d been shot?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I didn’t perform any post-mortem on the body. There was a small shotgun there. I didn’t stop to examine it. I saw what the score was and got out of there.”

“He’d crawled along on the carpet from the place where he was shot to the place where he’d died?”

“Yes.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know. Ten or fifteen feet.”

“Crawling?”

“Yes.”

“And died while he was crawling?”

“He may have died while he was resting,” Bertha said.

“I know but he was in a crawling position, stomach next to the carpet, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Face turned to one side or the other?”

“I don’t think so. I think his face was pressed down against the floor. I saw the back of his head.”

“Then how’d you know it was the blind man?”

“Why — from his build, I guess. The blind man lives there.”

“You didn’t turn the body over?”

“No. I didn’t touch the body. I didn’t touch anything. I got out of there and called you.”

“All right,” Sellers said, “let’s go. You’ve got a taxicab out there?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better ride with me. Knowing it’s the blind man, when you admit you didn’t look at the face, makes things look kinda funny.”

Sergeant Sellers turned to the taxi driver. “What’s your name.”

“Harry Simms.”

“What do you know about this?”

“Nothing at all. I takes this dame out looking for the place. She has the street number, but doesn’t know where it is. There’s no street lights because of the dim out. I have a map that shows me where the place should be — that is, what block. It’s pretty dark, and she’s got a dim-out flashlight. When we get to the block where the house is located, I tell her about where it should be. She tells me to stop, and she’ll find it herself on foot. She goes ahead and is gone for — oh, I don’t know — maybe five minutes, maybe ten minutes.”

“You were charging waiting time?”

“No. She was pretty cagey about that. I told her I’d wait up to fifteen minutes in case she wanted to go back before then. After that, I’d either charge her waiting time or go back. We do that once in a while when we’re pretty sure of a fare back to town.”

Sergeant Sellers nodded. “You sat there in the car?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“Just sat there and waited.”

“Radio in your bus?”

“Yes.”

“Was it on?”

“Yes.”

“Musical programme?”

“Uh huh.”

“Wouldn’t have heard a shot then, would you?”

The cab driver thought that over and said, “No, I don’t suppose I would — not so far down the street as where she made me stop.”

As the full implications of that dawned on Bertha Cool, she said, “What are you getting at? There wasn’t any shot.”

“How do you know?”

“I’d have heard it if there had been.”

Sergeant Sellers’s eyes regarded her with an appraisal in which there was no friendliness whatever. She might have been some building on which he was making a cash appraisal.

“That all you know?” he asked the cab driver.

“That’s all.”

“Simms, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s take a look at your licence.”

The cab driver showed him his licence. Sergeant Sellers took the number of the cab and said, “Okay, no reason to send you back out there. That’s all. You get in my car, Mrs. Cool.”

The cab driver said, “The fare’s one-eighty-five.”

“What do you mean?” Bertha Cool snorted. “It was only seventy-five cents going out there, and—”

“Waiting-time.”

“I thought you weren’t charging me any waiting time.”

“Not out there. I charged you waiting time here while you were telephoning the police and waiting for the squad car.”

“Well, I won’t pay it,” Bertha said indignantly. “The idea of charging waiting time on anything like that—”

“What did you expect I was going to do, stick around here and keep myself out of circulation? You’re the one that stopped and—”

“Give him one eighty-five,” Sergeant Sellers said to Bertha Cool.

“I’ll be damned if I do,” Bertha blazed. She took a dollar and fifty cents from her pocket, handed it to the cab driver, and said, “Take it or leave it. It’s all one with me.”

The cab driver hesitated a moment, looked at the police sergeant, then took the dollar and a half. When it was safely in his pocket, he delivered his parting shot. “She was in the house quite a while, Sergeant,” he said. “When she came out, she was running, but she was certainly in there long enough.”

“Thanks,” Sellers said.

Bertha glared at the cab driver as though she could have slapped his face.

“All right,” Sellers said to Bertha, “let’s go.”

She climbed into the automobile, taking the back seat which Sellers indicated. Sellers climbed in beside her, a police chauffeur doing the driving. There was one other man in the front seat and another beside Sergeant Sellers in the rear seat. Bertha Cool knew neither of them, and Sellers made no effort to perform introductions.

The chauffeur drove with swift skill, dimming his lights, however, as he topped the rise of ground and came within the area subjected to stringent dim-out regulations on the part of cars driving toward the ocean.

“I think it’s right after the next cross street,” Bertha said.

The police car slowed, crawling along close to the curb until Bertha said, “This is it.”

The men climbed out. Bertha said, “I don’t have to go in, do I?”

“No, not now. You can wait here.”

“All right, I’ll wait.”

Bertha opened her purse took out her cigarette case, and asked, “Is it going to be long?”

“I can’t tell you yet,” Sellers said cheerfully. “I’ll be seeing you.”

The men went on into the house. One of them came out after a few moments to get a camera, a tripod, and some floodlights. A few minutes later and he was back again, grumbling. “Not a damn bit of current in the whole house.”

“The man was blind,” Bertha said. “He didn’t need lights.”

“Well, I need a socket to hook up my floodlights.”

“Can’t you use flash bulbs?”

“I’ve got to,” the man said. “Don’t like ’em — not for the kind of stuff the sergeant wants. Can’t control the lighting as well as you can with floodlights. Can’t take the time to arrange things and see what you’re getting, and then sometimes you get reflections. Oh, well, it’s all in a lifetime.”

A few minutes later, Sergeant Sellers was back. “Well,” he said, “let’s get some particulars. What was this man’s name?”

“Rodney Kosling.”

“Know anything about his family?”

“No. I doubt very much if he has one. He seemed very much alone.”

“Know how long he’s been living here?”

“No.”

“All in all, you don’t know very much about him?”

“That’s right.”

“What did he want you to do for him? How did he happen to get in touch with you?”

“He wanted me to find someone.”

“Who?”

“A person to whom he had become attached.”

“Woman?”

“Yes.”

“Blind?”

“No.”

“Young?”

“Yes.”

“Find her?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I reported to him.”

“Who was the woman?”

Bertha shook her head.

“Not related to him?”

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

“Virtually.”

“Couldn’t have been that she was related to him and was tangled up with some man, and Kosling wanted to do something about it?”

“No.”

“You’re not being a great deal of help, Mrs. Cool.”

“Hell’s bells,” Bertha said. “I told you about finding the body, didn’t I? I could have walked out and left you holding the sack.”

Sellers grinned. “I’ll bet you’d have done just that too, if it hadn’t been for the taxi driver. That put you in something of a spot. You knew that after the body was discovered, he’d remember having driven you out here, and given the police a good description.”

Bertha Cool maintained a dignified silence.

“Ever occur to you that this fellow is a faker?” Sergeant Sellers asked.

“What do you mean?”

“That he wasn’t blind at all.”

“No,” Bertha said. “He was blind. I know.”

“How?”

“Well, in the first place, some of the things he told me about people — about what he’d deduced from sounds, voices, and steps and things of that sort. Only a blind man could have developed his faculties that way, and — well, look at the house. Not a light in it.”

“Oh, so you noticed that, did you?”

“Yes.”

“Try to switch on a light, did you?”

“Yes.”

“Rather unusual for you to go walking into strange houses, isn’t it?”

“Well, the door was open.”

Sellers said, “If you’re telling the truth, you can thank your lucky stars that the blind man got home first.”

“What do you mean?”

“A trap gun had been arranged so that when a person entered the house, he pulled against a thin wire, and that pulled the trigger on this four hundred and ten gauge shotgun. The moral of that is not to go wandering around strange houses just because the door’s open.”

“Why kill a man that way?” Bertha asked.

“Probably so someone would cook up a good alibi.”

Bertha thought that over.

“Well,” Sergeant Sellers said, “you’ll have to come in and take a look at him to make an identification. How old would you say this man was?”

“Oh, fifty-five or sixty.”

“He doesn’t look that old to me, and his eyes look all right.”

“How long’s he been dead?” Bertha asked.

Sergeant Sellers looked at her and grinned. “How long ago were you out here?”

“Oh, perhaps thirty or forty minutes.”

Sellers nodded. “I’d say he’d been dead just about that long.”

“You mean—”

“I mean,” Sellers interrupted, “that the man can’t have been dead more than an hour. If you were out here forty-five minutes ago, it’s very possible that he was killed just about the time you got here. Don’t bother to say anything, Mrs. Cool. Just come in and look at the body.”

Bertha followed him on up the walk to the house. The men apparently had completed their investigations and were sitting on a wooden bench at the far end of the porch. Bertha could make them out as a dark huddle of humanity distinguished by three glowing red spots which marked the ends of their cigarettes, spots which streaked up and down occasionally as the men removed the cigarettes from their mouths.

“Right in this way,” Sergeant Sellers said, and switched on a powerful, five cell spotlight which turned the darkness into dazzling brilliance.

“Not over there,” he said, as Bertha turned. “We’ve moved him. Take a look.”

The body had been placed on the table, and seemed terribly inanimate as it sprawled in the immobility of death.

The beam of Sergeant Sellers’s flashlight slid along the man’s clothes, paused momentarily on the red-matted garments where the bullet had entered, then slid up to come to rest on the man’s face.

Bertha Cool’s gasp of startled surprise gave Sergeant Sellers all the cue he needed. “It isn’t Kosling?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

The beam from the flashlight slid abruptly from the face of the dead man to shine full on Bertha Cool’s features.

“All right,” Sergeant Sellers said crisply. “Who is it?”

Bertha said dully and without thinking, “He’s a dirty, two-timing chiseler by the name of Bollman. He had a good killing coming to him — and you get that damn spotlight out of my face, or I’ll bust it.”