The Case of the Killer-Diller

Chapter Five Killer-Diller

Dusty said kiddingly: “I must think a lot of you. Nobody but you could drag me out of a nice warm steam-room at this ungodly hour of the night, kid.”

“You’re a life-saver, Dusty. I felt if I didn’t have someone to talk to, I’d go crazy. You know it’s awfully tough hanging around up here without Frankie.”

She sat down at the keyboard. He was in the same chair all the others had been in. She’d fixed it that way, so there was no other handy.

“Have you seen him lately?”

“I saw him yesterday. They let me visit him two or three times a week. The trial doesn’t come up until fall.” She started to play, as if absentmindedly. Her fingers were nearly coming off by now. “There’s a reefer of Frankie’s in that box there, if you want one.”

“Have one yourself.”

“I just finished one before you got here,” she lied.

She had to say that, in case he could still detect the fumes from previous ones smoked in the room, although she and Lindsey had opened the windows and aired it out before he got here.

He noticed what she was playing presently, after the first few bars had been gone over. “Don’t play that thing,” he remonstrated mildly. “I don’t like it.”

She shot a glance up into the mirror. “Why not, what’s the difference?” she said carelessly. “Anything just to keep my hands busy.” She went ahead.

“I got hold of a new number today for us to break in. Run over it instead of that one, see how you like it.” He came over, put some orchestration-sheets on the rack, went back and sat down again.

She ignored them. “All right, just let me finish this first. I like to finish anything I begin.”

Was that a sign of anything, his trying to switch her off the piece? Did he realize himself what it would do to him if she kept it up long enough. Was that why? Or was it just a harmless expression of preference? Anyone is entitled to dislike certain pieces of music and like others without necessarily being a murderer, she realized.

He shifted around a little in the chair, got up again, went over to the window, stood looking out. Then he came back, sat down once more, poured another drink. She quit breathing each time he passed in back of her, but went ahead playing.

He was showing more signs of being affected by it than either Armstrong or Kershaw had. It seemed to be making him restless. But was it that? She darted another swift glance up at the glass. He was tightening up a good deal, there was no doubt about that. Both his hands were clenched, and the toe of one foot, slung over the other, was twitching a little, almost like a cat’s tail does. On the other hand, she reminded herself, she mustn’t jump at hasty conclusions. He’d said he didn’t like the piece to begin with, and if he was either bored or annoyed by her playing of it in disregard of his request, he might still have shown these very same symptoms, without there being any sinister meaning to them whatever.

And then suddenly, when next she looked, he wasn’t moving at all, not even the tip of his foot now. He was sitting there as still as a statue, almost lifeless. His eyes, which had been on her back until then, were on the mirror themselves now. Had he seen something, caught some slight motion or waver on it, reflected by the closet-door? Had he sensed that this was a trap? If he had—

She watched at more frequent intervals now. He’d stopped looking up at the mirror after that one time she’d caught him at it, was looking steadily down at the floor now. He conveyed an impression of alert wariness, just the same. It wasn’t an abstract, unfocussed look, but a listening, watchful, cagey look.

The thing rose to its crescendo, shattered, stopped dead. The silence was numbing. He didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. A single bead of sweat glistened on his forehead, but the gin could have made him warm after coming out of a steam-room with all his pores open.

She refused to break the spell. Let him be the first to shatter it — for in that lay the answer.

He started to get up slowly. She could see the move coming long before his muscles carried it into effect. His overslung foot descended to the floor. Then there was a wait. His clenched hands drew back along the chair-arms, to give his body better leverage. Then another wait. His waist ballooned out and his knees drew in, straightened, carried his torso up to a standing position. Through it all, the position of his head alone did not change, remained tilted downward toward the floor. That managed to give an impression of secretive, furtive movement to his getting to his feet, like he was stalking someone.

Her nerves were stretched to the breaking-point. She wanted to scream with the suspense of sitting there waiting.

Then his head came up, and he said in the most matter-of-fact way, turning toward the door as he did so: “Guess I’ll shove off. My leg went to sleep.” He limped out into the hall, slapping at it to get back the circulation.

She reeled there at the piano bench, kept herself from falling by grasping the sides of it for a moment. Then she got up and went out after him.

At the door he chucked her under the chin in a big-brotherly sort of way. “S’-long, sweets,” he said. “See you at the bam tomorrow night.” The touch of his fingers, she couldn’t help noticing was ice-cold.

She closed the door after hint and looked behind her. Lindsey had slipped out of the closet, was coming up behind her. She warned him to silence, head tilted toward the door-seam, listening. “Sh! The elevator hasn’t taken him down yet.”

They waited a moment or two. Finally he eased the door open narrowly, peered through with one eye. “It must have, he’s not out there any more.”

“I usually can hear it slide shut.” She walked back into the living-room. “Well, it was no good, Lindsey,” she told him dejectedly, slapping her hands to her sides. “It didn’t work. It was the wrong answer. One time I thought he was getting steamed up, but then he subsided again, almost — almost as though he caught on you were in there.”

“If he did, he’s uncanny. I didn’t move a fingerjoint.” He kneaded his thatch baffledly. “Can’t figure it at all. It had to be the right answer. I still think it is, but — for some reason it muffed fire. It was the right time too, according to what the psychiatrists say. Just before daylight, when anyone’s power of resistance — including a murderer’s — is supposed to be at its lowest ebb.”

“What is there left? I’m so tired and discouraged. I’ll never get Frankie out of there!”

“Yes, you will,” he tried to hearten her. “You get some sleep. We’ll put our heads together again tomorrow. We’re not licked yet.”

She saw him to the door, closed it after him, and went in again. Almost immediately afterward the elevator door down the hall gave a hollow clang that penetrated to where she was. “Funny I didn’t hear that the first time,” she murmured, but didn’t bother any more about it.

She put out the light in the hall, lit up the bedroom, took off her dress, and put on a woollen wrapper. That took about three or four minutes. It was nearly five now, would be getting light in another quarter of an hour. The city, the streets outside, the rest of the building around her, were all silent, dead to the world. She remembered that she’d left the light on in the living-room. She went in there to snap it off. The place was still full of the acrid odor of the weed Dusty had smoked. She opened the window wide to let the fresh air in, stood there a minute, breathing it in.

There was a faint tap at the outside door of the flat, little more than the tick of a nail. She turned her head sharply in that direction to listen, not even sure if she’d heard it herself the first time. It came again, another stealthy little tap.

She moved away from the window and went out there to see. Probably Lindsey, coming back to tell her of some new angle that had just occurred to him. But what a way for him to knock, like an undersized woodpecker. He usually pounded like a pile-driver. He must be getting refined all of a sudden. She wasn’t frightened. The test had failed, and she didn’t stop to think that it might have delayed after-effect.

She opened the door and Dusty Detwiller was standing there. “Gee, I feel terrible bothering you like this,” he apologized softly. “I left the orchestration of that new number I was telling you about on your piano-rack. If you were asleep, I was going away again without disturbing you. That’s why I just tapped lightly like that.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Dusty, I’ll bring it right out to you.” She walked back into the living-room again, started to gather up the loose orchestration sheets and tamp them together. She thought she heard a slight click from the front-door lock, but didn’t pay any attention to it.

Suddenly there was a shadow looming on the wall before her eyes, coming up from behind her, from across her shoulder, the very thing she’d been dreading to see all evening long — and hadn’t until now. The loose orchestration sheets fell out of her hands, landed all over the floor around her feet. She couldn’t move for a minute, even to turn around.

“Don’t scream,” a furry voice purred close to her ear, “or you’ll only bring it on quicker. It won’t do you any good, you’re going to get it anyhow.”

She turned with paralytic slowness and stared into his dilated eyes. His whole face had changed in the few seconds since he’d come in from the door. He must have been holding the murder-lust in leash by sheer will-power until then. “I would have given it to you the first time, but I had a funny feeling we weren’t alone up here. Something told me somebody else was with us. I watched from the stairs going up to the floor above, and I was right. I saw that dick leave.”

His hands started to curve up and in toward her throat with horrible slowness, like the claws of a sluggish lobster. “But now you’re alone, there’s nobody here with you, and I’m going to do it to you. I told you not to play that piece. I don’t want to do these things, but that music makes me.”

If she could only reason with him long enough to get over to that phone on the opposite side of the room. “Dusty, don’t,” she said in a low, coaxing voice. “If you kill me, you know what they’ll do to you.”

His cleverness hadn’t deserted him, even now at the end. “The other guys were up here with you tonight too. They must’ve been — you wouldn’t have tried me out if you didn’t try them out too — so when they find you they still won’t know which of us did it. I got away with it the first three times, and I’ll get away with it this time, too.”

“But who’ll you get to do your canarying for you?” she choked, fighting desperately for time. She glanced once too often toward the phone, gauging its distance. He jumped sideways, like an ungainly dancing-bear on its hind legs, grabbed the phone-wire and tore it bodily out of the control-box.

Then he came back at her again, hands in that pincer-formation aiming at her throat.

She screamed harrowingly, unable to hold it in any longer, shifted madly sideways away from those oncoming, stretching hands, until the far wall blocked her and she was penned up in the angle formed by the two walls, unable to get any further away from him. The window she had opened before he came in was just ahead, in the new direction. “I’ll jump out if you come a step nearer,” she panted.

He was too quick. He darted in, the hands snaked out, locked around her throat just as she came in line with window-frame. For an instant they formed a writhing mass under one of the curtains.

There was a flash. His protruding eyes lit up yellowly as if he were a tiger, and then there was a deafening detonation beside her face that almost stunned her.

His hands unlocked again, but so slowly that she had to pry them off with her own before she was free of them. Then he went crazily down to the floor. His body fell across one of her feet, pinning her there. She just stood there coughing. A man’s leg came over the windowsill alongside of her, and then Lindsey was standing there holding her up with one arm around her, a fuming gun still in his other hand.

“Thank God there’s a fire-escape outside that window,” he breathed heavily. “I never would have made it in time coming up the inside way!”

He had to step over Detwiller with her in his arms, to get her to the piano-bench and sit her down.

“How’d you know I was in danger up here?” she asked.

“I didn’t for sure. I just saw something that struck me as a little strange.” He stopped, colored up a little. “I may as well admit I’ve gone kind of mushy. Every time I leave here I — sort of cross over and stand on the other side of the street watching your window until the lights go out. I was down there, and I saw you open this one and then turn your head quickly and stand there as if you were listening or heard something. I waited, but you didn’t come back again, and finally I started on my way. But the more I thought it over, the stronger my hunch got that everything wasn’t just the way it should be. I knew it wasn’t your phone you’d heard, because you wouldn’t have to stand there listening like that. You’d hear it without any trouble. So what else could it be but someone at your front door? By the time I got a block away, it got the better of me. I turned around and came running back — and I took the fire-escape to save time.”

“So you call that being mushy. Well you can’t be too mushy for me.” She looked over at the floor by the window. “Is he gone?” She shuddered.

“No, he’s not gone. He’ll live to take the blame for what he’s done. Only for him it’ll be an asylum, not the chair.” Detwiller stared at them vacantly.

“So now we know,” she murmured.

“Yes, now we know.”