She Woke to Darkness

10

That was the end of Elsie Murray’s manuscript. I laid it aside with an empty feeling of regret. If she had only gone on a little further!

But here was enough, it seemed to me, to provide a definite motive for her own murder. If the events in her story had happened (as she assured me they had) substantially as related by her, it seemed to me that at least one of her characters had a perfect reason for wanting the manuscript suppressed.

Poor silly Elsie! From the way she wrote about Dirk, it appeared that she was wholly unaware how cleverly he had used her in setting up an alibi for himself while pretending to provide her with one.

It is one of the classic gimmicks in detective fiction, of course, and I recognized it instantly.

But who was the man she called Dirk in her script? That was the burning question. She had told me that she had carefully changed all names and physical descriptions of the people involved, but it shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought, to identify him once one learned more about the girl herself and her associates.

The important thing was to get a duplicate copy made before the police came and impounded the one I had.

I looked at the slip of paper on which Ed Radin had written the address of the duplicating firm. It was a low number on West 45th Street. My watch said it was five o’clock. I slid Elsie’s manuscript back into its manila envelope, put on my hat and a light topcoat. With the envelope inside my coat and held through the cloth with my right hand in my coat pocket, no one would notice that I was carrying anything as I left the hotel.

I didn’t try to get out without being seen. I went down in the elevator, stepped out into the lobby briskly and nodded to the clerk at the desk just as though it was my regular custom to take a five A.M. constitutional. I went out onto 52nd Street and turned left to Madison Avenue, took off my eyepatch as I left the hotel and put it in my pocket.

I waited at the deserted corner only a matter of minutes before a cruising cab pulled in to the curb. I told the driver to drop me at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 45th, and he looked puzzled but didn’t ask any questions.

When he dropped me there, I walked west along 45th, taking the envelope from under my coat as I did so.

The address was a small hotel such as that particular district is dotted with. A clerk was dozing at the desk, and he yawned when I asked for the Overnight Duplicating Service, motioned to a corridor leading to the left off the rear of the lobby and said, “I think there’s someone working now. If they don’t answer the door I can call them.”

I went along the corridor to a door with a sign on it, and the word ENTER beneath.

Inside was a tiny reception hall with a waist-high shelf separating it from two rooms. One door was closed, but the other was open and the room was lighted. I could hear movement inside but couldn’t see anyone, and I called, “Anybody home?”

A man’s voice answered, “Be right with you.”

He came out in a moment, shirt-sleeved and weary-faced. I put the manuscript on the shelf and told him, “I’m a friend of Ed Radin, and he asked me to bring this by for him. A particular rush job. Can you knock out one copy fast for him?”

“For Ed Radin, I can and will. Let me look at it and try one sheet and I’ll tell you exactly how long it’ll take.” He opened the envelope and took out a sheet, looked at it with a nod of approval and said, “Ought to go through all right. Just a moment.” He stepped inside the lighted room and went to the rear out of my sight, and was back within a minute with the original sheet and a duplicate of it on good heavy paper in blue ink.

I glanced at it and saw it was perfectly legible, and said, “My God, that is fast.”

He nodded absently and riffled through the sheets, glancing at the final page number. “Only fifty-six pages,” he muttered. “You want to wait?”

“How long?”

He shrugged. “Fifteen or twenty minutes.”

I said, “I’d like a cup of coffee. Any place open around?”

“There’s a Childs’ on Sixth Avenue a little way up.”

I thanked him and went out and over to Sixth Avenue, putting my eyepatch on again. I found the restaurant almost deserted, ordered scrambled eggs with crisp bacon and coffee, and when the order came I made a fuss about the bacon not being crisp enough, and sent it back for more cooking. That, with my eyepatch and the earliness of the hour would impress my presence on the waitress, I thought, if the police did question me about my early morning stroll from the hotel. I left her a fifty-cent tip to further catch her attention, went back to the place on 45th, removing my patch again before entering.,

The duplicate was ready when I got there. I asked him how much and he told me two-eighty and I paid him, taking the original script and telling him, “Ed Radin will be in to pick up the duplicate copy later. Will you hold it here for him?”

He said he’d be glad to, and I went out, walked up Fifth Avenue to 52nd and east to the Berkshire, replacing my eyepatch and slipping the large envelope inside my coat again.

It wasn’t quite six o’clock when I reentered my suite. I laid the manila envelope on the coffee table, dropped my hat on top of it. Then I poured out a big slug of cognac and carried it in to the bedroom where I stretched out without undressing. I drank it straight down and left the light on while I smoked one cigarette and reviewed my situation as dispassionately as I could.

I wasn’t frightened or particularly worried. I simply couldn’t believe I was really a murder suspect. True, I was the last person known to have seen Elsie Murray before her death, and I had absolutely no proof that she had been alive when I left her apartment. There would be plenty of tough questioning I knew, and plenty of official suspicion. But all I had to do was tell the simple truth and stick with it. They couldn’t prove I was lying, because I wouldn’t lie. Except about the telephone calls to Radin and Shayne, and my trip to the duplicating place. And even if they did dig out the truth about those, they weren’t particularly damning. They were exactly what an innocent man would have done (what an innocent man had done, I corrected myself).

No. I wasn’t squirming or frightened. I found myself looking forward with interest toward the police interrogation that was to come, speculating on the questions that would be asked and mentally framing the answers I would make.

As a writer I couldn’t help appreciating the opportunity I was going to have to watch an actual homicide case develop from the inside. Not only would I see and hear the cops at work, but I would actually experience much of what I’d had to imagine in the past while writing about such cases.

I realized and admitted frankly to myself, that having Ed Radin and Michael Shayne on my side made a great big hell of a difference about the way I felt. Without those two to back me up, I might well have been frightened. But I had absolute faith in Shayne’s ability to solve any case presented to him. He had never failed in the past, and this time it was his best friend in trouble.

I didn’t know anything about Ed Radin’s abilities as a detective, but I did know he was almost universally liked and respected by the New York homicide men, and his vouching for my character and integrity would carry a lot of weight. At least, I wouldn’t get any undue pushing round such as might happen to another poor devil in my position and without my friends.

I put out my cigarette and turned out the light, closed my eyes and began mentally going back over Elsie’s script step by step. It seemed almost certain that she, herself, had been unaware that what she had written was a threat to anyone. Else she wouldn’t have dared write it in the first place with the thought of publication in mind. And if she had put it down on paper, she certainly would not have allowed the person whose safety was threatened to read it.

No. It seemed obvious that Elsie had no idea who the killer was in her story. That’s why she had given up writing it. She had said she had a fictional solution worked out, but no idea what the real truth was.

Yet, I was convinced the truth was hidden there in her typescript. One of the characters involved with Aline Ferris in the earlier affair had murdered the man she called Vincent Torn. And now he had murdered Elsie and stolen a copy of the script from her apartment to prevent her from showing it to me.

Dirk, of course, was the obvious suspect. In fact, he seemed to me the only real possibility among the four involved.

I tried to put Dirk out of my mind, pretending for the moment that this was wholly fictional and thus the most obvious suspect should be eliminated.

That left Bart, Ralph, Doris and Gerry. Well, Ina, too. Dirk’s wife. Though it was difficult to see what possible motive she could have for killing Vincent Torn. There was nothing to indicate she even knew the man. If the motive for Torn’s death had been jealousy, that certainly left Ina Dreer out.

And also Doris. Unless, by chance, Doris had secretly been in love with Torn. But she was alibied by Ralph. Just as he was alibied by her. Almost exactly the same sort of situation as existed between Aline and Dirk.

In that case… if it were a manufactured alibi… Ralph was a possibility. The presence of Aline’s bag in his car was highly suspicious. Of course, he had glibly explained how it came there, but was that explanation the true one?

Could Ralph have driven Aline to the Halcyon Hotel… followed by Torn? Could not Torn have discovered them together and been killed by Ralph in an ensuing fight?

No. We knew Ralph had left her on her doorstep as he claimed. The telephone call to Torn proved she had gone into the cocktail lounge and borrowed a dime from the bartender after Ralph dropped her.

It all began to get hazy and tenuous when I reached that point in my speculations. I kept coming back to Dirk, and the clever manner in which he had induced Aline to provide him with an alibi while leading her to believe he was doing her a favor by providing her with one.

Once we found out the true identity of the man whom Elsie called Dirk, I felt we’d be well on the way to the solution of two murders.

So I rolled over and went to sleep.