Night and Fear

I

Merrill stirred uncomfortably at the prolonged osculation taking place on the screen. “Break!” he muttered unromantically. “Come up for air!” He fanned himself mockingly with his hat. He took out his watch. “Two solid minutes they been at it,” he remarked.

“Sh, Bill!” His fair companion favored him also with a stab of the eyes and a sharp dig of the elbow. “Let somebody else enjoy it, even if you can’t! You don’t have to look at it if it hurts that bad. Close your eyes till it’s over.”

He promptly carried out the suggestion, effacing the two gigantic heads still pressed tightly together on the silver screen. “I don’t hafta come here to sleep. I can sleep at home, free of charge,” he mumbled rebelliously.

“It’s a double feature,” she reminded him tartly. “Maybe the second one’ll be better.”

He sighed sightlessly. “It couldn’t be worse.” He gave a cavernous yawn, genuine this time and not pretended. He sank a little lower in his seat, eyes still closed. His features relaxed. Soon a burbling sound like coffee in a percolator came from him. His head slipped sideways by notches, until it came to rest on the girl’s slim shoulder. Somebody in the row behind them snickered.

Her attitude, now that he was no longer a witness to it, was entirely different from what might have been expected. A smile dimpled her pretty cheeks. She sloped her shoulder to make him more comfortable, reached around and gave the other side of his head a little pat. “Poor kid,” she said to herself, “dead for sleep!”

Betty Weaver was a good sport; you have to be when you’re an ace detective’s best girl.

The nip of a hefty heel coming down on one of his pet toes jolted Merrill awake with a grunt. There was a man trying to worm his way past him to the vacant seat on the other side of Betty. The usher with the torch standing helpfully by hadn’t been much help showing him where to step and where not to. Merrill jerked his foot back and screwed up his face.

“I’m sorry,” said the man softly, and edged through with his back to them. Merrill doubled his leg up in front of him and held onto his throbbing toe with both hands.

He put it back on the floor again, and leaned out across Betty to give the man a dirty look. The latter’s eyes weren’t used to the dark yet; he didn’t seem to notice it, but sat squinting straight ahead at the screen. He’d kept his coat on, with the collar up in back, although the way the place was jammed, it was pretty stuffy.

Merrill sat back again, his indignation evaporating as long as there had been no answering look for it to feed on. The five-minute kiss had finally faded out and they were showing trailers now. He shifted his attention to the program, determined to get his forty-cents-worth of show even if it was next week’s.

A lion showed up, burped at the audience, and the newsreel came on. Merrill liked newsreels. Betty evidently didn’t. She took out her mirror and began to inspect her face by the fairly strong gleam coming from the screen. It was a snow scene, skiers on a mountain, flashing down runways that were steep and dazzling white.

It changed abruptly to a group of prison officials, posing with a convict in their midst, seemingly in the greatest of friendliness. The picture was a “still,” snapped by a newspaper photographer nearly two years before, incorporated now in the newsreel because of its timeliness. That convict standing there beside that numskull warden had escaped since then, had made a name for himself by his later exploits that topped Jesse James’, and was the object of the biggest man-hunt in the history of the country. Nobody in that theater needed the voice of the announcer to tell them who that was, but he did anyway. A sort of shudder passed through the audience at the sound of the name; it had become a household word all over America.

“Take a good look at this man, ladies and gentlemen,” the sound track pattered. “You’ve been hearing a lot about him lately, and you don’t need to be told who he is. Chink-eyes Harriman — and they’re still out looking for him!”

“Harriman,” sounded in suppressed whispers from all parts of the house. “Harriman — see him?” The audience rustled like a flock of uneasy doves.

Merrill became cold and tense all at once, every nerve taut as piano wiring. The hand that suddenly gripped the wrist with which Betty was replacing her mirror in her handbag was like an iron clamp. She gave a nervous start, but had presence of mind enough not to cry out. He was beckoning for the glass with his other hand, but keeping it close to his body. The little quick-silvered oblong passed between them unobtrusively. She still didn’t know what it was all about; glanced at him inquiringly, but remained still as a mouse.

“Keep looking straight ahead,” he breathed out of the corner of his mouth. “Sit back a little in your seat.” She closed the inch gap between her shoulders and the back of the seat, so he knew she’d heard him.

He palmed the glass with his right hand, the hand that dangled out over the aisle; it just fitted between second-joints and heel. Then he brought it up sidewise, unobtrusively, to the level of his face, and turned his eyes toward it. He was looking out toward the aisle. The glass was turned inward toward the row of seats. Betty’s little nose intruded on the edge of the reflection for a second, then almost instinctively her head retreated still further and carried it back out of the way. The profile of the man next to her had the glass to itself.

He was still squinting, and he’d been in ten minutes now, so the squint was habitual and not because of the darkness of the theater. It gave his face a Mongolian cast.

Merrill shifted his eyes to the screen for purposes of comparison, then back to the mirror again. One was full-face, the other a profile, and so identification couldn’t be established instantly, not even by a trained eye like Merrill’s. But the eyes, the squinting, slitted, malicious eyes, were the connecting link. They were a perfect match to those on the screen. That was Chink-eyes Harriman sitting two seats away, staring with perfect composure at his own picture! In fact, he was even enjoying himself a little, to judge by the canine curl of his upper lip.

Just as the “still” on the screen dissolved, but while it was still printed impalpably on Merrill’s retinas, he seemed to feel the latter’s indirect gaze on him via the mirror, because he turned inquiringly that way for an unguarded moment and presented himself full-face. Nose, mouth, chin, cheekbones, width of brows and facial oval all clicked simultaneously, reproducing what had just been on the screen like a positive matching a negative. So, in spite of the stories going around, he hadn’t gone in for facial surgery.

He must have seen the mirror. Merrill just had time to grimace hideously and pretend to be digging between his teeth for a morsel of food. It was a bad slip, and a question of who had beaten the other to it: Harriman’s glance over or his own pantomime. The killer turned his head incuriously front again, so that seemed to answer it. He stirred a little in his seat, the better to enjoy a row of half-clad bathing girls parading up and down a Florida beach.

Merrill could hear Betty breathing a little faster, as though she knew something was up but couldn’t figure out what it was. He saw her shut her eyes for a minute, then open them again.

He slipped the mirror back to her under her arm, and her handbag swallowed it. Then he plucked at her sleeve and jerked his thumb at the aisle. The first step was to get her out of there and to the back of the theater. The guy was probably loaded down with equalizers, while he himself didn’t have a thing on him — which was what you got for thinking you were ever really off duty in his racket.

He had no idea of jumping on him where he sat. There’d be pandemonium in the middle of all these people, and the dump was lousy with unguarded exits. The thing to do was to phone in, have the place surrounded, and pick him up as he came out. Merrill planned even to come back and sit down again where he was so he could keep his eye on the guy until the pay-off.

Betty sat staring straight ahead with a face like marble. Merrill wondered what was the matter with her — she was usually very quick on the pick-up. He tugged at her again and thumbed the aisle. Her eyes flicked toward him but she didn’t turn her head. You couldn’t hear her breathing any more. She sat deathly still.

They had, fortunately, come in ahead of the desperado, so he had no way of checking on them. Merrill found her small foot with his, prodded it, then said audibly: “This is where we came in, isn’t it?”

All she did was shake her head, but without looking at him.

He had to get word out without another minute’s delay; the show wouldn’t break for another forty minutes or so, but that couldn’t be taken into consideration in this case. Harriman wasn’t just an ordinary movie patron, staying to the end. He might get restive any minute. Something might arouse his suspicions. He might light out before a cordon had been thrown around the building.

“I’m dying for a smoke,” Merrill said. “I’m going back and grab one off. Be right with you again.” Now he’d have to clear her out after he’d lit the fuse.

She sat there like a statue, rigid, without answering. But suddenly, as he braced his legs under him to get up, she clawed at his coat sleeve with her hand, between their two bodies. She twisted the goods around, caught up all the slack there was, until the sleeve was almost as tight as a tourniquet. It was as though she wanted desperately to tell him something, without being able to.

He tensed at that. A momentary sense of immediate danger swept over him. But when he thrust his head slightly back across her shoulders, Harriman seemed lost to the world, devouring the screen with vacant, moronic enjoyment, mouth idiotically ajar, beady eyes shining. He was a million miles from nowhere!

“Bill—” She spoke in a furred voice, kneading his sleeve frantically, but stopped abruptly. He could hear her give a sudden intake of breath. She didn’t go ahead. He waited. When it came, the rest of it, it was flat, toneless. “I’m thirsty. Bring me a drink of water from the cooler when you come back—”

It was just the way anybody would ask for a drink of water, casually, off-hand. But when that “Bill—” and that stranglehold on his coat sleeve didn’t match the rest of it; it was as though the request had been improvised, to cover up what she had originally started to say. When he glanced at her, she kept staring at the screen, eyes slightly dilated; wouldn’t look at him.

He got up and left the seat without another word, made his way soundlessly up the thick-carpeted aisle, not walking too fast lest the man in the seat next to her turn around and look after him. He turned and looked back at the two of them from the head of the aisle. Their heads were there side by side, amidst all the other heads. Everything was still under control. Harriman had made no move following his own departure; seemed not to have even noticed it. He’d have to get back there quick, though, and get her out of the way. He cursed the sudden stubborn streak that had cropped out in her just now; she’d hear plenty from him when this was over! She ought to know by now that everything he did, he knew just what he was doing!

The moderate up-grade walk changed to a quick lope as he crossed the inner foyer behind the orchestra pit, buttonholed the usher on duty. “The telephones — where are they, quick!”

“Downstairs in the smoking lounge.”

A small electric sign pointed the way through the gloom. He streaked down the stair-well to sub-basement-level, came out into a room crammed with modernistic furniture and stuffy. It was somebody’s idea of luxury, at four jits a throw. A vintage of flapper was sitting there puffing, using the place as an up-to-date club room.

There was only one phone, but the fact that it was already in use didn’t deter him for a minute. He sandwiched in between this second flapper and the wall, said something about police business, took the receiver away from her, and got rid of her party by sinking the hook. He cut her cheeps short by unslinging the glass panel between them, scraping about an inch of talcum off her.

“I’m at the Cortelyou Theatre, on the North Side,” he told headquarters, “and Chink-eyes Harriman is here in the audience. Am I sure?” he echoed caustically. “I’m sitting two seats away from him, and he lounged all over my dogs just now getting in! Of course, if you want me to ask him, I’ll hear what he has to say!”

“Don’t get wise,” he was told dryly. “No one said they’re not taking your word for it. Now get this, Merrill.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll have a dragnet thrown around the whole block in less than five minutes. In the meantime, these are your instructions and see that you follow them: keep your eye on him, but don’t give yourself away — not even if he gets up to leave before we’ve closed in. Just tail him if he does. Don’t try to take him on single-handed, you understand? We’ll only lose him again, and the whole damn thing’ll start over—”

“I’m not in a fix to dispute that with you,” Merrill said, coloring. “I’m here unheeled.”

A low whistle sounded at the other end. Then the voice became impersonal again. “We’ll get him when he comes out. If he stays till the end, do what you can to protect the audience. We’re taking him dead, of course. Now get back and don’t lose sight of him for a minute. You can consider yourself personally responsible if there’s a slip-up!”

“I’m right on his neck!” Merrill broke the connection, came out to find one flapper yanking the other bodily toward the stairs by one arm. She had evidently been eavesdropping. “Harriman’s in the audience! Hurry up!”

II

Merrill beat them to the foot of the stairs, blocked the way. “No y’ don’t! Go up there and start a riot, wouldje? You’re staying until it’s over now. You know too much, both of you!” He motioned toward a door. “G’wan, get in there — nothing’ll happen to you!”

He pushed the pair of them toward it and through it, and closed it on them. He knew they’d slip out again the minute the coast was clear, but he slid one of the bulky modernistic divans over in front of the door to block it from the outside and hold them as long as possible. He rocketed up to the top of the stairs, flagged the usher, palmed his badge.

“You go down there, son, and sit on that divan you’ll see in front of the ladies’ door. Don’t let anybody out until I tell you to,” he whispered. “I’m holding a couple of janes in there. Don’t listen to what they’ll try to tell you — they’re dips, pickpockets. You’re my deputy — I’ll square it with the manager for you!”

The boy gave him a thrilled look, disappeared below.

He filled a paper cup at one of the filters, took out a pencil stub and scrawled on the outside of it: “Get the hell out of here and home, explain later,” in an annoyed scowl.

He started down the aisle none too slowly, splashing a little water as he went. Instantly, the moment the slight dip of the orchestra floor set in and long before he came abreast of the row he had left them in, he knew something was wrong. There was a double gap there in the ranks of heads — two were missing. And the vacant aisle seat that had been his own told which two it was.

He squeezed the paper cup flat. Water spurted out of both ends, and he ran the rest of the way.

Her coat was still draped across the back of the seat she’d been in. Like a mute distress signal. There was no sign that Harriman had ever sat there beside her. His seat was folded up flat.

Merrill nearly threw himself on top of the spectacled matron occupying the fourth seat in from the aisle, shaking her by the shoulder. “The two people next to you — how long ago — did they get up together?”

“Just now,” she said stupidly. “Just before you got here. They’ll be back. She left her coat—”

He knew better. He knew they wouldn’t. He knew a lot of things all at once — and too late. Why she’d sat there so rigid, refusing to budge, afraid to turn and look at him. Harriman had caught onto the mirror stunt at a glance; must have been sitting there with his gun digging into her from that moment on.

He knew what that despairing clutch at his sleeve meant now, and that quickly stifled “Bill—” that had ended so lamely in a request for a drink of water. And he, like a fool, had thought he was putting one over on the sleepy-eyed menace beside her. Now Harriman had taken her with him as a hostage; was using her as a living safe-conduct to see him out of the theater.

He fled up the aisle to the rear of the house again, like someone pursued by devils. One usher he’d sent downstairs, but there was another one on duty inside the main door. Merrill grabbed at him like a drowning man at a straw. “A man and a girl — man with sleepy eyes and a gray coat turned up in back — did they go out this way? Have you seen them?”

“Yeah, just couple minutes ago.”

“Oh, Lord!” he groaned, and cracked open one of the opaque swinging doors that gave onto the outer lobby. In the instant that it swayed open he had a bird’s-eye view of the vestibule and the street beyond. The light had gone out in the ticket seller’s kiosk and her blond head was missing, yet it was not empty. He saw a form silhouetted through it against the marquee lights beyond. And on each side of the entrance, where there were tinselled sandwich boards advertising coming attractions, idle individuals stood killing time, as if reading the display copy over and over. He recognized both of them. The cordon surrounding the place had already been formed.

The usher was saying behind him, “But they didn’t go out. They came as far as here and I opened the door for them, then they changed their minds and went upstairs to the balcony—”

So the cordon had just beaten him to it. But he’d seen them before they saw him, and had doubled back in again — with her! Merrill didn’t feel any relief at the knowledge that he was still in the theater with her. Quite the opposite. She was almost certainly a goner, now that the man was trapped!

“I think she’d been taken sick,” the usher was babbling unasked. “She looked pretty white, and she kept sort of leaning against him wherever they went. I tried to ask her if she wanted a doctor, but they’d gone upstairs before I had a chance—”

Merrill wasn’t listening. “The roof — he can get up there from the balcony, can’t he? There must be some way up!”

He gave a short, surreptitious whistle through the crack of the door, and one of the rubbernecks down by the display boards was suddenly vis-a-vis to him, as though he moved on invisible wires.

“He’s hep,” Merrill breathed through the slit. “The roof — tell them to throw men into the adjoining buildings quick and head him off. The roof is only two stories high and he can get out that way! I think that’s where he’s heading for—” And then a sort of choked cry broke from him against his will. “And if they see somebody with him up there in the dark, tell them — it’s my girl — will ya?” Instantly he pulled himself together again. “Lend me a gun, will you? I’m clean in here. I’m going after him inside!”

It was still warm from the other’s body. He pocketed it and went running up the branch of the stairs the usher had pointed to before.

Above, they deployed onto a mezzanine gallery, a long narrow space between the back of the theater and the sloping balcony seats, but walled off from the latter. Two arched openings, one at each end, led out to the seats, and in the middle, but set high up near the ceiling, was the squat, ponderous metal door guarding the projecting room, with just an ordinary, vertical iron ladder reaching to it.

The balcony usher who had been stealing a look at the picture as closing time neared, materialized guiltily at the far end; came running at the vicious swing of Merrill’s arm. “Two people just come up here from below, man and a woman?”

“No, nobody’s shown up here. They wouldn’t this late any more—”

“Then you missed ’em!” Merrill barked. “Show me how to get up to the roof!”

“Patrons aren’t allowed—”

“Show, or I’ll hang one on you!” He stiff-armed him for a head-start, and the brass-buttoned juvenile went stumbling at nearly a forty-five degree angle toward a panel stenciled No Admittance, just within one of the lateral passageways, leading toward the seats. It worked neither on hinges nor a knob, but on a vertical bolt running from top to bottom the entire length of it. Merrill hitched this up and shoved, but the way the thing resisted and the metallic snarling it rewarded him with was pretty conclusive evidence it hadn’t been opened recently.

“I’m going up and take a look anyway,” he instructed. “Stay here and hold it open for me so I can get in again!”

A short, steeply-tilted flight of iron stairs led to a duplicate of the first hatchway, and there was a decrepit bulb lighting the space between the two. He went back to the latter, and took the precaution of giving it a couple of turns to the left; it expired and made him less of a target from the roof outside when he’d forced open the second door.

It was just as well he had. The squeaking and grating of the second door boomed out all over the roof, with the tall surrounding buildings to help it along acoustically. Instantly a handful of angry bees, steel jacketed, seemed to swarm at it as he swung it cautiously out, and it clicked and popped in a half-dozen places at once. But the flashes of yellow and the bangs that accompanied them came not from the roof itself but from the various windows overlooking it. The reception committee was greeting the wrong guy, that was all.

“That would’ve been one for the record, if—” he thought grimly. Still, it wouldn’t have been their fault any more than his. He’d flattened himself on the steps like a caterpillar, chin resting on the top one, while he held the door on a crack with one hand. Threadlike as the slit was, something whistled and plopped into the plaster behind him instead of hitting the side of the door. “That’s Ober, showing off how good he is!” he scowled resentfully. “He oughta be in a sideshow with those eyes of his!”

The thought of what would have happened if it had been Harriman, with Betty in front of him, wasn’t a pretty one. But it was a pushover Harriman hadn’t come up here, or if he had, had doubled back again in a hurry, like at the downstairs door. Otherwise he’d be lying stretched out on the tar out there right now, and they wouldn’t be wasting time trying to riddle still another.

He was reaching behind him with his free hand, trying to get his handkerchief out of his back pocket and flap it at them in some way, when a voice boomed out: “Hold it, men, for God’s sake! He’s got a girl with him—” They’d just sent word up, and that would have been a big consolation to Betty, turned into a human lead pencil.

Merrill straightened up, gave the door a kick outward with his foot, and bellowed forth: “It’s Merrill, you bunch of clodhoppers! Why don’t’cha use a little self-control!” A figure poised on one of the window sills and jumped down to the theater roof below with a sound like a bass drum. But Merrill had already turned and gone skittering down the stairs again, to where the usher was calling up to him: “Hey, you! Quick, you up there—”

He missed the last few steps entirely, but there was no room to fall in — just landed smotheringly on the uniformed figure below him. The show must have “broken” in those few minutes while he was up on the roof. The blaze of light coming through from the auditorium inside told him that, and the peaceful humming and shuffling from belowstairs as the audience filtered out and dispersed, all unaware of what had been going on in their midst. It was just a “neighborhood” show house, it hadn’t been a big crowd, and the balcony was already empty and still. But the usher, as they both picked themselves up, was pointing a trembling hand out into the gallery.

Merrill took in three things at once: the motion picture operator lying flat on his back groaning, as though he’d just been thrown down bodily out of the projection room; the projection room door above, momentarily open and blazing with incandescence to reveal Harriman’s head and shoulders; and the iron ladder swinging out from the wall as it toppled and fell, pushed down by Harriman.

Merrill had the bead on him already, and it wouldn’t have taken a dead shot like Ober to plug him with all that blaze of light behind him, but Betty’s head showed just behind him and her scream came winging down. Merrill’s finger joint stayed despairingly, and the slamming tight of the door cut short her scream and effaced the single opportunity that had been given him.

He just stood there staring sickly upward at where the opening had been, as the full implication hit him. They had him now, sure — trapped, cornered at last, after one of the bloodiest chases in criminal history. But he had them too! He had Merrill, anyway. And that was just the trouble; Merrill was under orders, wasn’t alone in this.

The audience safely out of the way, his fellows came pouring up the stairs from below, and another group came clattering down from the roof. The cordon had tightened into a knot gathered there under the projection room door. Merrill, very white and still, just pointed to it without a word.

III

The captain took the situation in at a glance. “Okay, it’s all over now but the shouting,” he nodded grimly. “But it’s going to be pretty messy.” He began spitting orders right and left. “Close up all those side exits. Bring up those gas bombs. Spread yourselves out. Don’t gang up here. He’s liable to pop out again and take half of you with him.”

The whole place started to swim in front of Merrill’s eyes. He saw them pick up the operator, announce he had a broken collar-bone, and carry him downstairs. He saw them bring up two Tommy-guns, set one up on each arm of the stairs at floor level, tilted to command the projection room door from each side of the mezzanine.

The captain said: “Lug that acetylene torch up on the roof. Cut a hole down on top of him. Take the manager with you — he’ll be able to locate the right spot for you.”

A livid little man was hustled toward the companionway Merrill had climbed earlier, protesting: “My house! My beautiful house! What’ll the owners say when they hear?”

“You, Ober, you’re supposed to be good,” was the next command. “Go down on the main floor and when I give the word have yourself a pot-shot at the camera sights or whatever other openings there are in front. We might be able to let a little ventilation into him from that side. And now you two with the Tommies, have a try at this door from where you are. Let’s see if it’s bullet proof or not. Back, everyone—”

It was the man whose gun Merrill had borrowed, who stepped up and said, “He’s got Bill’s girl in there with him. For God’s sake, Cap, you’re not gonna—”

The captain whirled on Merrill furiously. “What’s the matter with you anyway? Why didn’t you speak up? Is that what you been standing there looking so scared about?”

Merrill’s knees were about ready to buckle under him; he ran his hand through his hair a couple of times as though he couldn’t think straight any more. “We were gonna be married in June,” he said wildly. “I thought I was only bringing her to a movie show—” His voice died away forlornly.

“Ahrr, damn wimmen anyway!” the captain snapped unreasonably.

There was a sudden silence. None of the men moved. The orders hung fire. Then abruptly a bell jangled somewhere nearby. A second time, then a third.

“What’s that?” said the captain, looking all around him.

The manager, held under duress at the roof steps, came forward frightenedly. “That’s him! That’s the projection room trying to get me in my office, not the house phone: Three rings — he must have read the signal on the wall in there! He must want to tell you some—”

“All right, get in there and show us how it works!” The captain gave him a push behind the shoulder. He and Merrill and one of the others followed him into his private sanctum and stood watching, while he unhooked a hand set and pressed a button on the edge of his desk. He held the phone frightenedly out toward the captain as though afraid it would bite him. “Here... you... you better talk to him!”

The captain snatched the instrument away from him. They all stood waiting tensely. “Can you hear me in there?” he snapped.

His jaw set at the answer. He muffled the thing against the desk top with a bang. “Safe conduct or he’ll bump the doll,” he repeated for their benefit.

Merrill looked haggard. His breath sang in his chest like a windstorm. The captain stole a sidewise look at him. “All right,” he muttered to the other man, “he wins. We’ll get him the minute he lets go of her, anyway!”

But the three of them shared a single unspoken thought: “He won’t let go of her — alive.”

The captain lifted the phone again. He was stony faced, and couldn’t bring himself to speak for a minute. Finally he swallowed hard, gritted out: “So you want a safe conduct, Chink-eyes!”

The answering voice was audible but indistinguishable; like a file rasping against metal.

The captain’s face was red with humiliation; he turned his back on the three standing listening. “I see — as far as the storm canopy over the sidewalk out front,” he said in a trembling voice. “And I’m to call my men off—”

“This is hard to take,” muttered the detective standing beside Merrill.

“And how do we know you’ll keep your word?” the captain said.

“He won’t, and we all know he won’t!” Merrill groaned. “He’ll drag her off with him some place and shoot her down like a dog the minute he gets in the clear, to pay us back for a close shave like this! We’re bargaining over a corpse; she’s been dead from the minute I left her alone in that seat next to him!”

The captain muttered, scarcely above a choked whisper, “Okay, Chink-eyes, you win this round — we’re pulling in our horns.” He threw down the instrument and slumped into a chair for a moment, shading his eyes with one hand. “This is my finish,” he breathed. “I’ll be broken for this!” And then his voice rose to a roar. “But what else could I do? Answer that, will you? What else could anyone do?”

He stood up again, pounded his fist on the desk. “There’s still one chance we got left of outsmarting him in the long run! He ain’t letting go of her out there. He’ll get her out in front, and he’ll Hag a cab and yank her in it with him, that’s his only way of making a clean getaway, of shaking us off. That’s what we gotta figure on, anyway; he’s a rat, and you don’t bank on a rat’s promises. All right, Merrill, this’ll be your job! You get out there now ahead of him, rake up a cab, and be waiting down the street in it — in the driver’s seat.

“Watch your timing at that wheel. If you can be coasting along slow when he comes out, instead of standing still waiting, it’ll look that much better. Don’t try nothing on your own, now — you’ll only lose him for us! Hop to it! He’ll bleed for this — later.”

He turned and marched out, gave crisp orders to the men outside, his face expressionless as though this wouldn’t go down as the blackest night in police annals for all time to come. “Call them down off the roof with that blow torch. Get down to the main floor with those Tommies. Clear the mezzanine! Everybody down to the orchestra floor. Line up down there by the stairs. Put your guns away and don’t anybody raise a hand. There’s a girl’s life at stake!” He called in to the manager behind him: “Put the house lights on, every last one of ’em. We don’t want any shadows hanging around to bungle things up for us.”

The manager scurried across to a control box; frantically pulled down switches right and left. The theater outside blazed to a noonday brightness.

Merrill had vanished.

The faces that met the captain’s and turned away to carry out the incredible orders, were pictures of amazement, stifled by discipline. Not a word was said. The bitterness of the pill he was having to swallow was only too evident on the “old man’s” countenance.

“Must be some kind of a come-on, to get him out of there,” one of the policemen breathed, backing a machine-gun downstairs.

“Na, it’s the girl.”

“But she’s a goner anyway! He’ll only do it out on the street afterwards—”

They all knew it instinctively, even the “old man” himself. But she had to have her chance. She was a girl, and she was Bill’s girl. The almost certainty of her death mustn’t be turned into a dead certainty, not while there was the slightest means within their power of pulling her through. Which didn’t prevent the lot of them from wishing heartily she’d never been born at all. Or had been born in China.

IV

The captain was the last one down off the stairs. “All right, fall in there, along these stairs. Face the lobby out front. Fold your arms behind you.”

They stiffened. A look of resentment that grew to burning hate kindled, swept across their faces, but they held their tongues. The blazing lights beating all around on them, turned the thing into a parody of the line, with themselves in the part of the suspects, for once. They were swearing softly, some of them, under their breaths, a sort of hissing sound like steam escaping from a valve.

Their captain sized up the long, helpless line strung across from right to left, and then he closed his eyes as though he couldn’t bear the sight.

“Where’s Merrill?” someone asked his neighbor out of the corner of his mouth.

“Probably gone off somewhere to bump himself off!” was the scathing answer.

“He should have waited,” groaned the captain, “and I’d be ready to join him after this night’s work!”

The captain turned to face the way they were. “Attention,” he said almost inaudibly. Then he raised his voice and called to the manager up above: “All right, go back in there and ring him — tell him he’s in the clear!” Then he just stood there after that, beside his men, like a very old man, chin down, shoulders bowed, waiting.

The inner doors to the lobby had all been folded back, giving an unobstructed view from where some of them were all the way to the silent, deserted street out front. At the far end, like a marker beyond which the safe-conduct expired, stood the tenantless ticket booth, door thrown open to show it was empty and a light burning inside it. Beyond was a ribbon of yellow sidewalk under the marquee lights, and the darkness of the street, with once in a while a car skirting by, never dreaming what was going on inside. From out there it must have seemed just a movie house thrown open for ventilation after the last audience had left it.

A breathless silence engulfed the whole place from top to bottom after the captain’s last order. They could hear the manager slam down some window that had been left open in his office. Then the faraway triple buzz of his signal sounded in the nearly soundproof projection room. His voice came down to them clearly, through his open office door. “You’re in the clear, they’re all down below!” Then the office door banged as he locked himself in up there, out of harm’s way.

There wasn’t another sound throughout the house for maybe five minutes.

The pall of silence lay heavier and heavier upon the waiting, listening men, until their nerves were ready to snap with the increasing tension. Every eye was on the stairs that came down from the mezzanine.

Suddenly a heavy door grated open somewhere out of sight, up above them, and they tensed. He was reconnoitering. Then there was an impact, as though somebody had jumped, immediately followed by a second, lighter one. Then nothing more for awhile, while seconds that were like hours ticked themselves leadenly off into eternity, and the tension had become almost unbearable. One or two faces showed gleaming threads of sweat coursing down them.

Then, like a flash, something appeared on the topmost step, just under where the ceiling cut the staircase off from view, and they all saw it at once, and they all stiffened uncontrollably in unison. A woman’s foot, in a patent leather pump, had come down slowly onto the step, as though it were feeling its way.

That was all for a minute. Then its mate came down on the step below it, showing a short section of ankle this time. Then the first one moved past it, down to the third step. And behind them both, as the perspective lengthened following each move they made as closely as in a lock-step, came a man’s two feet. The sinister quadruple extremities advanced as slowly as some horrible paralytic thing descending a staircase, slowly lengthening.

The heads only came in view when they were near the bottom. He had his right arm around the girl, holding her clamped to him in an embrace from behind. Her head leaned back against his shoulder, as though she were incapable of standing upright any longer.

She didn’t look out at them; it was he who did, and nodded grimly. His free arm, dangling in a straight line from his shoulder, ended in a wink of burnished metal — another gun, for surely there was one already pressed menacingly close to her sagging body.

They came down off the stairs and for a moment presented a perfect double target, broadside to the deathlike row of policemen ranged across the width of the orchestra. The captain held them in leash with a single glance of his dilated eyes, and not one stirred. “Steady!” he breathed. “For God’s sake, steady!”

Slowly the double target telescoped itself into a single one — the girl — as Harriman turned the two of them to face his enemies, then began to back up a step at a time through the long mirrored lobby toward the street.

His voice suddenly shattered the almost unbearable stillness. “I hope you raked ’em all in from out there — for her sake! If I get it in the back, she goes with me!”

“I’ve kept my word, Harriman!” the captain shouted back. “See that you keep yours. That ticket-booth’s the deadline!”

“Back!” snarled Harriman suddenly. “Ba-ack!” The line of men had begun to inch forward, trying to keep the distance between from widening too hopelessly as Chink-eyes retreated through the long funnel of the lobby.

Harriman came abreast of the ticket booth, veered off to one side of it after a single flick of his eyes had show n him it was harmless. He moved a step beyond it, a second step, was out on the open sidewalk now under the marquee. He gave a swift glance up one way, down the other.

“Turn that girl loose, you’re in the clear now!” the captain roared out to him.

He had reached the edge of the curb now with her. His arm went up, signalling off to one side, and a faint droning sounded, coming nearer.

“Merrill!” the captain breathed fervently. “Don’t spoil it, now, boys — there’s still a chance of saving that girl. Hold it,” he pleaded, “hold it!”

The oncoming hum suddenly burst into a sleek, yellow cab body, braking to a halt directly behind Harriman and the girl, so close it almost seemed to graze him. “Open the door!” they heard him growl, without taking his eyes off them.

A gasp went up from them as they watched.

In the full glare of the lights overhead, the grinning bronzed face of a negro flashed around as he turned to carry out the order. The cab door swung free. Harriman had already found the running board with the back of one foot. “D’ye want her?” he snarled back. “Then there she is, come and get her!”

The sudden widening of the space between their two bodies as he stepped back to avoid his own bullet, without dropping the encircling arm, showed what his intent was — murder and not release.

A form suddenly dropped from above, like something loosened from the rim of the marquee, and flattened Harriman with a swiftness impossible for the eye to follow, even in all that bright glare. It was Merrill’s hurtling body, rounded into a ball.

There was a flash in front of the girl, but out from her as the impact jerked Harriman’s curved arm straight. A sprinkling of glass trickled from the canopy overhead.

She went down in the struggle and a moment later emerged unharmed from the squirming tarantula that had formed on the sidewalk, crawling away on her hands and knees toward the sanctuary of the ticket booth. The cab driver, frightened, sped onward with his empty machine without waiting.

What remained as she drew away had two heads, four arms, four legs, all mixed inextricably together, threshing around, tearing itself to pieces. Metal glinted from it, and one head reared above the other. Only a lunatic could have risked a shot at such a target from back in the inner foyer of the theater. Yet a shot roared from inside, and the upper head dropped flat. For a moment the whole thing lay still, as the line of police broke and came rushing out toward it.

Ober came out last, blowing smoke out of his gun.

Merrill slurred Harriman’s body off his gun, and stood up shakily in the middle of all of them. The desperado lay squinting up at the marquee overhead, a black trickle threading out of one ear.

The captain was almost incoherent with rage. He shook his fist in Merrill’s face; acted like he was going to throw himself at him bodily. “I oughta demote you for insubordination! What the devil do you mean by deliberately disobeying my orders? I told you to commandeer a cab and tail him, not pull off a flying-trapeze act out here on the sidewalk!”

It was mostly relief — blowing off high-pressure steam after the terrible suspense.

“We got him, didn’t we?” Merrill blazed. “It was a cock-eyed idea, getting a cab. He could’ve pinged me from the back the minute he got suspicious and then where’d—” He stopped. Betty was squeezing his arm warningly. He caught on what the squeeze meant: we’ll be needing your salary after next June, so shut up.

He did. And he looked up at the marquee while the captain went ahead getting things off his chest and they all stood around and listened. It said up there in screamy fiery letters: Double Feature, Most Exciting Show in Town, Your Money’s Worth for 40c.

“Yeah,” he thought grimly, “that was no lie, either.”

Afterword to “Double Feature”

“Double Feature” (Detective Fiction Weekly, May 16, 1936) is one of the earliest and most vivid and breathless of Woolrich’s action whizbangs. A memorable thriller hung on a simple peg of plot, with a big-city movie palace as the setting and with emotions and action in perfect counterpoint — who but Woolrich could have pulled it off?