Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Bill Pronzini Under the Skin

In the opulent lobby lounge of the St. Francis Hotel, where he and Tom Olivet had gone for a drink after the A.C.T. dramatic production was over, Walter Carpenter sipped his second Scotch-and-water and thought that he was a pretty lucky man. Good job, happy marriage, kids of whom he could be proud, and a best friend who had a similar temperament, similar attitudes, aspirations, likes and dislikes. Most people went through life claiming lots of casual friends and a few close ones, but seldom did a perfectly compatible relationship develop as it had between Tom and him. He knew brothers who were not nearly as close. Walter smiled. That’s just what the two of us are like, he thought. Brothers.

Across the table Tom said, “Why the sudden smile?”

“Oh, just thinking that we’re a hell of a team,” Walter said.

“Sure,” Tom said. “Carpenter and Olivet, the Gold Dust Twins.”

Walter laughed. “No, I mean it. Did you ever stop to think how few friends get along as well as we do? I mean, we like to do the same things, go to the same places. The play tonight, for example. I couldn’t get Cynthia to go, but as soon as I mentioned it to you, you were all set for it.”

“Well, we’ve known each other for twenty years,” Tom said. “Two people spend as much time together as we have, they get to thinking alike and acting alike. I guess we’re one head on just about everything, all right.”

“A couple of carbon copies,” Walter said. “Here’s to friendship.”

They raised their glasses and drank and when Walter put his down on the table he noticed the hands on his wristwatch. “Hey,” he said. “It’s almost eleven thirty. We’d better hustle if we’re going to catch the train. Last one for Daly City leaves at midnight.”

“Right,” Tom said.

They split the check down the middle, then left the hotel and walked down Powell Street to the Bay Area Rapid Transit station at Market. Ordinarily one of them would have driven in that morning from the Monterey Heights area where they lived two blocks apart; but Tom’s car was in the garage for minor repairs, and Walter’s wife Cynthia had needed their car for errands. So they had ridden a BART train in, and after work they’d had dinner in a restaurant near Union Square before going on to the play.

Inside the Powell station Walter called Cynthia from a pay phone and told her they were taking the next train out; she said she would pick them up at Glen Park. Then he and Tom rode the escalator down to the train platform. Some twenty people stood or sat there waiting for trains, half a dozen of them drunks and other unsavory-looking types. Subway crime had not been much of a problem since BART, which connected several San Francisco points with a number of East Bay cities, opened two years earlier. Still, there were isolated incidents. Walter began to feel vaguely nervous; it was the first time he had gone anywhere this late by train.

The nervousness eased when a westbound pulled in almost immediately and none of the unsavory-looking types followed them into a nearly empty car. They sat together, Walter next to the window. Once the train had pulled out he could see their reflections in the window glass. Hell, he thought, the two of us even looked alike sometimes. Carbon copies, for a fact. Brothers of the spirit.

A young man in workman’s garb got off at the 24th and Mission stop, leaving them alone in the car. Walter’s ears popped as the train picked up speed for the run to Glen Park. He said, “These new babies really move, don’t they?”

“That’s for sure,” Tom said.

“You ever ride a fast-express passenger train?”

“No,” Tom said. “You?”

“No. Say, you know what would be fun?”

“What?”

“Taking a train trip across Canada,” Walter said. “They’ve still got these crack expresses up there — they run across the whole of Canada from Vancouver to Montreal.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about those,” Tom said.

“Maybe we could take the families up there and ride one of them next summer,” Walter said. “You know, fly to Vancouver and then fly home from Montreal.”

“Sounds great to me.”

“Think the wives would go for it?”

“I don’t see why not.”

For a couple of minutes the tunnel lights flashed by in a yellow blur; then the train began to slow and the globes steadied into a widening chain. When they slid out of the tunnel into the Glen Park station, Tom stood up and Walter followed him to the doors. They stepped out. No one was waiting to get on, and the doors hissed closed again almost immediately. The westbound rumbled ahead into the tunnel that led to Daly City.

The platform was empty except for a man in an overcoat and a baseball cap lounging against the tiled wall that sided the escalators; Walter and Tom had been the only passengers to get off. The nearest of the two electronic clock-and-message boards suspended above the platform read 12:02.

The sound of the train faded into silence as they walked toward the escalators, and their steps echoed hollowly. Midnight-empty this way, the fluorescent-lit station had an eerie quality. Walter felt the faint uneasiness return and impulsively quickened his pace.

They were ten yards from the escalators when the man in the overcoat moved away from the wall and came toward them. He had the collar pulled up around his face and his chin tucked down into it; the hill of the baseball cap hid his forehead, so that his features were shadowy. His right hand was inside a coat pocket.

The hair prickled on Walter’s neck, and he glanced at Tom to keep from staring at the approaching man, but Tom did not seem to have noticed him at all.

Just before they reached the escalators the man in the overcoat stepped across in front of them, blocking their way, and planted his feet. They pulled up short. Tom said, “Hey,” and Walter thought in sudden alarm; Oh, my God!

The man took his hand out of his pocket and showed them the long thin blade of a knife. “Wallets,” he said flatly. “Hurry it up, don’t make me use this.”

Walter’s breath seemed to clog in his lungs; he tasted the brassiness of fear. There was a moment of tense inactivity, the three of them as motionless as wax statues in a museum exhibit. Then, jerkily, his hand trembling, Walter reached into his jacket pocket and fumbled his wallet out.

But Tom just stood staring, first at the knife and then at the man’s shadowed face. He did not seem to be afraid. His lips were pinched instead with anger. “A damned mugger,” he said.

Walter said, “Tom, for God’s sake!” and extended his wallet. The man grabbed it out of his hand, shoved it into the other slash pocket. He moved the knife slightly in front of Tom.

“Get it out,” he said.

“No,” Tom said, “I’ll be damned if I will.”

Walter knew then, instantly, what was going to happen next. Close as the two of them were, he was sensitive to Tom’s moods. He opened his mouth to shout at him, tell him not to do it; he tried to make himself grab onto Tom and stop him physically. But the muscles in his body seemed paralyzed.

Then it was too late. Tom struck the man’s wrist, knocked it and the knife to one side, and lunged forward.

Walter stood there, unable to move, and watched the mugger sidestep awkwardly, pulling the knife back. The coat collar fell away, the baseball cap flew off as Tom’s fist grazed the side of the man’s head — and Walter could see the mugger’s face clearly: beard-stubbled, jutting chin, flattened nose, wild blazing eyes.

The knife, glinting light from the overhead fluorescents, flashed between the mugger and Tom, and Tom stiffened and made a grunting, gasping noise. Walter looked on in horror as the man stepped back with the knife, blood on the blade now, blood on his hand. Tom turned and clutched at his stomach, eyes glazing, and then his knees buckled and he toppled over and lay still.

He killed him, Walter thought, he killed Tom — but he did not feel anything yet. Shock had given the whole thing a terrible dreamlike aspect. The mugger turned toward him, looked at him out of those burning eyes. Walter wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go with the tracks on both sides of the platform, the electrified rails down there, and the mugger blocking the escalators. And he could not make himself move now any more than he had been able to move when he realized Tom intended to fight.

The man in the overcoat took a step toward him, and in that moment, from inside the eastbound tunnel, there was the faint rumble of an approaching train. The suspended message board flashed CONCORD, and the mugger looked up there, looked back at Walter. The eyes burned into him an instant longer, holding him transfixed. Then the man turned sharply, scooped up his baseball cap, and ran up the escalator.

Seconds later he was gone, and the train was there instead, filling the station with a rush of sound that Walter could barely hear for the thunder of his heart.

The policeman was a short thickset man with a black mustache, and when Walter finished speaking he looked up gravely from his notebook. “And that’s everything that happened, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Yes,” Walter said, “that’s everything.”

He was sitting on one of the round tile-and-concrete benches in the center of the platform. He had been sitting there ever since it happened. When the eastbound train had braked to a halt, one of its disembarking passengers had been a BART security officer. One train too late, Walter remembered thinking dully at the time; he’s one train too late. The security officer had asked a couple of terse questions, then had draped his coat over Tom and gone upstairs to call the police.

“What can you tell me about the man who did it?” the policeman asked. “Can you give me a description of him?”

Walter’s eyes were wet; he took out his handkerchief and wiped them, shielding his face with the cloth, then closing his eyes behind it. When he did that he could see the face of the mugger: the stubbled cheeks, the jutting chin, the flat nose — and the eyes, above all those terribly malignant eyes that had said as clearly as though the man had spoken the words aloud: I’ve got your wallet, I know where you live. If you say anything to the cops I’ll come after you and give you what I gave your friend.

Walter shuddered, opened his eyes, lowered the handkerchief, and looked over to where the group of police and laboratory personnel were working around the body. Tom Olivet’s body. Tom Olivet, lying there dead.

We were like brothers, Walter thought. We were just like brothers.

“I can’t tell you anything about the mugger,” he said to the policeman. “I didn’t get a good look at him. I can’t tell you anything at all.”