She Woke to Darkness

13

A congenitally frustrated Lothario, Avery Birk was feeling exceedingly well pleased with himself on this particular morning. He lay on his back on a wrinkled and soiled sheet covering a double bed on the third floor of a Village walk-up and contemplated the florid and erotic painting that covered the entire ceiling of the bedroom while he made little sucking sounds of satisfaction with thick lips and briefly considered the pleasures of sex.

Avery Birk never failed to find voluptuous pleasure in contemplating the painting over his bed. It reminded him of the one complete and undiluted sexual triumph in his life. The artist had been a horsy female from the midwest who was, if possible, even more sexually frustrated than he. He had met her, luckily, only a few days after her arrival in New York from some village in Indiana where she had spent forty-two drab years waiting for her widowed mother to die and leave her a small legacy with which she could storm the artistic citadels of New York.

A barren virgin, and bewildered by the wonder of it all, Avery Birk was the first male person in New York to appreciate her potentialities and to invite her to be seduced.

She showed her appreciation by living with him for two weeks and then committing suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol. During those two weeks she painted the mural above the bed where she had first discovered sexual pleasure.

This morning Avery was contemplating one of the shadowy nudes above him and thinking with pleasure how much she resembled Elsie Murray. A large part of the pleasure flowed from the degrading perversion being practiced by the nude. Elsie had been revolted by the painting the one time Avery had cunningly plied her with enough strongly spiked drinks to overcome her natural aversion of him and get her into his apartment.

She had insulted him, by God, right here in his own bedroom when he tried to induce her to lie down just for a little rest.

All right. So she’d made her bed and he hoped she liked it. Walking out of the banquet with that one-eyed bastard, Brett Halliday, last night. Where was she this morning? Dead, by God, and good enough for her.

It had been disgusting, that’s what. Utterly disgusting to see how she fawned on the guy. What did he have that all the others in MWA who have tried to make her didn’t have? It wasn’t only himself, Avery told himself with sly pleasure. There had been plenty others to whom she’d given the brush-off. She was too good for all of them, though she’d never had a story published in her life.

Until Halliday came along. Who in hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who’d written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.

God! He must be almost forty, Avery Birk ruminated. Maybe that was one explanation for a girl like Elsie taking up with him. A man of that age couldn’t be very dangerous. With him, a girl might have her cake and eat it, too. That’s why she picked on him in the first place when there were so many younger and more virile men around to choose from.

A loud knocking on the outer door interrupted Avery’s pleased musings. He scowled and lumbered out of bed, stood for a moment in faded cerise pajamas before going into the small stuffy living room to open the door.

It would be the cops. They’d said for him to stay home and they’d be around to get a statement from him though he’d insisted over the phone he knew absolutely nothing about the case except that he’d seen the two of them go out together.

He supposed he should have dressed more formally for their visit, but what did it matter? He was a writer, wasn’t he? A Bohemian. He had to live up to the Village’s reputation. The police expected this sort of thing. They’d suspect he wasn’t a real author if they found him all spruced up like a businessman.

In his bare feet and with tousled hair, Avery Birk pulled the door open and was confronted by a tall man with a deeply lined face and wearing a Palm Beach suit and Panama hat.

At least they had sent a detective to interview him, not some dumb cluck in uniform with no understanding of the artistic temperament.

He stepped aside and said, “Come on in. I’m sort of hung over this morning, so I hope you’ll take me as I am.”

“That’s all right,” said Shayne curtly. “I just want a little information.” He wrinkled his nose against the stench of stale cigarette butts, the musty, almost fetid odor of a small apartment whose windows were seldom opened and where fresh air was regarded as unwholesome.

“I can’t tell you very much,” said Avery importantly. “Just what I reported over the telephone. Here. Sit down.” He pulled a pair of slacks and a sweated undershirt from the room’s only chair, and padded backward to a sofa covered with a garish pseudo-Navajo blanket. “Care for a drink? I think there’s some gin. And I know there’s a jug of muscatel.”

Shayne said, “Thanks, no. We want everything you know about Elsie Murray.”

“It isn’t much. I used to see her around. She was one of those girls who longed to be a writer but didn’t have much talent. They hang around us professionals. You get used to it when you’re well-known.” He yawned and smiled lasciviously. “It’s pleasant at first. Feeds one’s ego. Then you have to beat them off with a broom and they get to be a frightful bore.”

“Where was she from?” demanded Shayne impatiently. “Who were her folks? What was her background?”

“Christ, I don’t really know. Did she have folks… a background? One gets to thinking, you know, that girls like Elsie just spring out from under a rock. Sort of parthenogenesis, if that’s the word I want.”

“All right.” Shayne concealed his rising irritation as best he could. “So you don’t really know anything about her. Tell me about last night. You claim you saw her leave with a man named Brett Halliday.”

“That’s right. A fellow from out of town who horned in on our annual banquet. Oh, he had a right to be there, I guess. I believe he is a writer of sorts, though not a really big name in the field. Wears a black eyepatch, though they do say there’s nothing wrong with his eye and he simply does it to attract attention. That type.”

“We know all about Halliday,” said Shayne impatiently. “We want information about Elsie Murray.”

“Have they arrested Halliday?” asked Birk eagerly. “Does he deny being on the make for her all evening and buying the poor kid more drinks than she could handle? She does pass out sometimes, they say, and I presume…”

“Who says she passes out sometimes?” demanded Shayne sharply.

“I don’t know. I’ve heard it around. It was perfectly disgusting,” Birk went on warmly, “to see a guy like Halliday working his wiles on a nice girl like that. When he finally persuaded her to leave with him, I thought, ‘Oh, oh! Watch your step with that old goat, Elsie’.”

“We’re not interested in what you thought. Just facts,” snapped Shayne. “Who would be able to tell us more about Elsie?”

“Now you’re asking really intimate questions,” protested Birk with an assumption of coyness. “It wouldn’t be quite gentlemanly for me to answer, I think.”

Shayne stood up. He moved two steps across the room and his face was set in hard lines. “I haven’t time to waste here. Where can I get the information I want?”

“I’m a citizen and I have my rights. You can’t go around…”

“The hell I can’t,” snarled Shayne. His open right hand struck Birk’s cheek loudly, slewed the heavy figure sideways on the sofa. “Start talking.”

Avery Birk slunk away from him appalled at this show of violence. “I’ll report you,” he sputtered. “You can’t get away…” His voice ended in a high-pitched gurgle as Shayne leaned over and fastened the fingers of his left hand in the pajama collar and twisted it. He heaved Birk up to a sitting position and slapped him again.

“Stop playing games.” His voice was low and hard and his eyes were frighteningly cold. “Where do I go to find out more about Elsie Murray?”

Avery Birk wriggled desperately in his grasp, and tears of mortification ran down his cheeks. “Never in my life,” he sputtered, “Never in my whole life…”

Shayne took a backward step and jerked him upright. He stood with right fist poised, a foot from Birk’s face. “You’ve got just two seconds to give me a name before I knock all your teeth down your throat so you’ll never speak again.”

He meant it! Avery Birk knew he meant it. This was the most terrible injustice he had ever encountered. They should be thanking him instead of knocking him around. He was a hero, wasn’t he? If he hadn’t told them about Brett Halliday…

He swayed back weakly and mumbled, “Try Lew Recker. He knew her best, I guess. He claimed they were sleeping together, though you never can tell about Lew. He’s always boasting…”

Shayne dropped him disgustedly on the sofa where he cowered, covering his wet and bruised face with both hands.

Shayne got out a pencil and wrote down the name. “Address?”

Birk gave it to him. An apartment building on Madison in the forties.

He didn’t hear Shayne go out. All he heard was the loud slam of the door behind the redhead, and he lay there weeping quietly and wondering in bewilderment why he was never appreciated… why things like this were always happening to him.