She Woke to Darkness

Postscript

That was the end of it. The hospital doctors were right and I did come out of my coma that same afternoon. With no permanent damage to anything except my pride.

What a hell of a mess I’d made out of my opportunity to watch the unfolding of a murder case from the inside out! Lying gagged and unconscious in a hotel room just down the corridor from my suite while Ed Radin and Mike Shayne solved the case for me!

Lew Recker had signed a full confession by the time I came to in the hospital. He was the writer Elsie had showed her manuscript to, of course, being convinced in her own mind that he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Green’s death and thinking it quite safe to show it to him. All because of his clever lie to her about the telephone call she hadn’t made to Green.

It was Recker, of course, who had telephoned Elsie while I was with her that night, and who had been told by her that she planned to let me see the script the next day.

After strangling Elsie, he looked around her apartment for the manuscript, but found only the carbon copy there. Knowing there couldn’t be a carbon without an original, he correctly deduced that Elsie had lied to him over the phone and that the original must already be in my possession.

Not knowing how to reach me in New York, Recker went through hell for a couple of hours until he hit upon the device of calling Dorothy Gardiner and using the name of George Coxe to get the name of my hotel and room number.

After checking in on the same floor under an assumed name, Recker came to my room with the same blackjack that had killed Elbert Green and rang my buzzer.

I can verify this part of his confession. I had dropped off to sleep fully dressed only a short time before, and was dazed and groggy when I heard the buzzer and stumbled to the door. I opened it and vaguely saw the figure of a man standing there, and felt something hit me a terrific wallop.

And that was all I did know.

The only thing that saved my life at that moment (Recker admitted in his confession) was the fact that Elsie’s script lay on the table still in its original envelope underneath my hat. He knew I had come in late after drinking a good deal, and assumed I had simply tossed the envelope down without reading it and dropped into bed.

If I hadn’t read it, I was no danger to him. All he had to do was destroy this second copy to be safe.

But he couldn’t be absolutely positive I hadn’t read it, or enough of it to come up with the truth if I recovered later. So he didn’t want to leave me there in my own room where I’d be discovered quickly, yet he had a certain aversion to committing another cold-blooded murder unless it was necessary.

He solved the problem by dragging my unconscious body down the short length of corridor to his own room, binding and gagging me and leaving a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door.

That way, he felt I was safely immobilized for the time being at least while he sat tight to see what happened. Later, he could have returned at his leisure to finish me off if that course seemed indicated.

But Mike Shayne got to him before he decided that was necessary, so I’m still alive to tell the story.

Next time I attend a mystery writers’ banquet in New York, I shall take Mike along as a bodyguard. And when I meet an attractive and sensuous female at the bar I’ll turn her over to Mike and run like hell.

That’s his forte-definitely not mine.