The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

The Witness Was a Lady

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1960.

It was a Thursday morning when Corey McDown called me. I hadn’t heard from Corey for a long time. Not directly. After he got to be a cop, we sort of drifted apart and lost contact with each other. I’m not exactly allergic to cops, you understand, but it usually turns out that we’re incompatible.

Corey was a bright guy, and he’d moved up fast in the force. He was pretty young for a lieutenant in Homicide.

“Hello, Mark,” he said. “Corey McDown here. Did I get you out of bed?”

“I don’t have to get out of bed to answer the phone,” I said. “How are you, Corey?”

“I’ve been worse,” he said, “and I’ve been better. I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”

“Do I owe you a favor?”

“Do this one for me, and I’ll owe you one.”

“You think I may need it?”

“You may, Mark. You never know.”

“True. There have been times before. What’s on your mind, Corey?”

“I hate long telephone conversations. Ask me over.”

“Sure, Corey. Come on over.”

“Give me thirty minutes.”

He hung up, and so did I. It must be a big favor he wanted, I thought, to make him so accommodating. I had an uneasy feeling that it was related to something that I didn’t want to think about, and I wished I could quit. I got out of bed and shaved and showered and dressed, which used up the thirty minutes. I had just finished when the door buzzer sounded, and I went out across the living room to the door and opened it.

“Right on time,” I said. “Come on in.”

He came in and tossed his hat into one chair and sat down in another. His hair was cut short, a thick brown stubble, and he looked trim and hard. Right now, leaning back and smiling, relaxed.

“You’ve got a nice place, Mark. You live well.”

“Heels always live well. It’s expected of them.”

“You’re not a heel, Mark. You’re just a reasonably good guy with kinks.”

“Thanks.” I walked over to a table and lifted a glass. “You want some breakfast?”

“Out of a bottle?”

“Is there another place to get it?”

“I had mine out of a skillet. You go ahead.”

I poured a double shot of bourbon and swallowed it fast. Then I went back and threw his hat on the floor and took its place. The double helped me feel as relaxed as he looked.

“Go on,” I said. “Convince me.”

“Don’t rush me. I’m trying to think of the best approach.”

“The best is the simplest. You want a favor. Tell me what it is.”

“Let me ask you a question first. You seen Nora lately?”

“No. It’s been forever. Why?”

“I thought you might have looked her up when Jack Kirby was murdered.”

“I didn’t.”

“That’s strange. Old friends and all, I mean. The least an old friend can do when an old friend’s boy friend is killed is to offer sympathy and condolences and all that.”

“My personal opinion is that congratulations were in order. I didn’t think it would be in good taste to offer them.”

He looked across at me, shaking his burr head and grinning. The grin got vocal and became a loud laugh.

“You see, Mark? All you’ve got are a few kinks. A real twenty-four carat heel like Jack Kirby offends your sensibilities.”

“Go to hell.”

“Sure, sure. Anything to oblige. What I’m leading up to is, this favor isn’t really for me at all. Oh, incidentally it is, maybe, but mostly it’s a favor for Nora.”

“You sound like a man about to be devious, Corey.”

“Not me, Mark. Whatever I may be that makes me different from you, I’m not devious. I haven’t got the brains for it.”

“O.K. Tell me the favor for Nora that’s one for you incidentally.”

“I’ll tell you, but let’s get the circumstances in focus. Did you read the news stories about Jack Kirby’s murder?”

“Once over, lightly.”

“In that case, you’ll remember what the evidence indicated. He had an appointment with someone in his apartment. At least someone came to see him there, and this someone, whoever it was, killed him. Cracked his skull with a heavy cut-glass decanter, to be exact. This was all in the news stories, and it’s all true. What wasn’t in the stories, because we put the lid on it, is that someone pretty definitely knew who it was in the apartment with Kirby that night. That someone is Nora.”

“How do you know?”

“Never mind how. We know.”

“That won’t do, Corey. You can’t expect to clam up on the guy you’re asking for a favor.”

“All right. I’ll tell you this much. The day of Kirby’s murder, Nora told a friend that she was going to Kirby’s apartment that night, but she couldn’t go until late because Kirby was expecting someone earlier that she didn’t want to meet. This friend is a woman whose testimony can be relied on. We’re convinced of that.”

“Didn’t Nora mention the name of Kirby’s expected guest?”

“No. No name. Just that it was someone she didn’t want to meet there.”

“Did you ask Nora?”

Corey looked down at his hands in his lap. He folded and unfolded the blunt fingers. On his face for a few seconds there was a sour expression as he recalled an experience that he hadn’t liked and couldn’t forget.

“We hauled her in and asked her over and over for a long while. She wouldn’t say. She denied ever having told her friend that she knew.”

“I wonder why. You’d think she’d want to help.”

“Come off it, Mark. You know why as well as I do. Jack Kirby was a guy who associated with dangerous characters. One of these characters killed him, and he wouldn’t think twice about killing a material witness. Either to keep her from talking or in revenge if she did. If he couldn’t do it personally, he’d have it done for him. Today or tomorrow or next year. Nora’s been associating with some dangerous characters herself, including Kirby. She knows how they operate, Mark. She won’t talk because she’s afraid.”

“Well, Nora’s not exactly a strong personality. She’ll break eventually. Why don’t you ask her again?”

“I wish I could.”

“Why can’t you? Like you said, she’s a material witness. You can arrest her and hold her.”

“I could if I could get hold of her.” He looked down at his hands again, at the flexing fingers. His face was smooth and hard now, the sour expression dissolved. “I should have held her when I had her, but that was my mistake. A man makes lots of mistakes for old times’ sake.”

“Asking and giving favors, you mean. That sort of thing.”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Speaking of favors, where do I come in? If you think I know where Nora is, you’re wrong.”

“That’s not the problem. I already know where she is.”

“In that case, why don’t you pick her up?”

“Because she’s across the state line. You may know that we don’t have any extradition agreement with our neighbor covering material witnesses.”

“I didn’t know, as a matter of fact. Thanks for telling me. It may come in handy. I don’t seem to remember reading any of this about Nora in the papers.”

“I told you. It wasn’t there. We’ve kept the lid on it. The point is, we can’t keep the lid on any longer. The story’s going to break in the evening editions, and that’s what worries me.”

“I can see why. You won’t look so good, letting a material witness slip away from you. Tough. You expect me to bleed, Corey?”

“It’s not that. I’ll survive a little criticism. It’s Nora I’m worried about.”

“Old times’ sake again?”

“Call it what you like, but you can see her position. She’s a constant and deadly threat to Jack Kirby’s killer, whoever he is, and the moment the story breaks, the killer is going to know it. He’ll also know where to find her.”

“I see what you mean. The threat works two ways.”

“That’s it. And that’s where you come in.”

“Don’t tell me. You want me to go and talk to her and convince her that she’s got to come back and turn herself in for her own good.”

“You’re a smart guy, Mark. You always were.”

“Sure. With kinks. To tell you the truth, I’m not quite convinced that this mysterious visitor of Kirby’s is going to be so desperate as you imagine.”

“You think he won’t? Why?”

“Well, Nora knows he was supposed to be at Kirby’s at a certain time. At the time Kirby was killed. So she knows. That’s not absolute proof that he was actually there. Even if he was there, it’s not proof that he did the killing. It’s a lead, Corey, not a conviction.”

“A lead’s all we need. The visitor killed Kirby. We’re certain of it. Once we know who he was, we’ll find more evidence fast enough. We’ll know what to look for, and how and where to find it.”

“You haven’t told me yet where Nora is.”

“About a hundred miles from here. The first place I thought to check. The natural place for a woman to run when she’s scared and in trouble.”

“Home?”

“What used to be. Down on the farm.”

“Regression, as the psychs say. You were sharp to think of that right off the bat, Corey. You’re quite a psych yourself.”

He got up suddenly and walked over to a pair of matched windows overlooking a small court in which, below, there was some green stuff growing.

He stood there looking out for a minute or more, and then he turned and walked back but did not sit down again.

“You and Nora were always close, Mark, back there when we were kids. Closer than ever Nora and I were. I used to hate you for that, but it doesn’t matter any longer. It’s one of the things I’ve gotten over. The point is, she’ll be in danger. I believe that or I wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t listen to me, but she might to you. Will you go talk to her?”

“Why should I?”

“Do you have to have the reasons spelled out?”

“I can’t think of any.”

“As a favor for me?”

“I don’t want to obligate you.”

“For Nora, then?”

“Nora wants me to leave her alone. She told me so.”

“Not even to save her life?”

“Nora’s a big girl now. She associates with dangerous characters and makes up her own mind.”

He stood looking down at me, his face as bleak and empty as a department store floorwalker’s. Turning away, he picked his hat off the floor and held it by the brim in his hands.

“I guess those kinks are bigger than I thought,” he said.

He went over to the door and let himself out, and I kept on sitting in the chair, thinking about a time that he’d recalled. She used to ride into town to high school on the school bus, Nora did. Corey and I were town boys. We were snobbish with the country kids until we met Nora, who was a country kid, and then we weren’t snobbish any more. She was slim and lovely and seemed to move with incredible grace in a kind of golden haze. She was so lovely, in fact, that she intimidated me for almost a full year before we finally got together on a picnic one Sunday afternoon. After that, I began to know Nora as she was — as a touchable and lusty little manipulator, almost amoral, who already had, even then, certain carefully conceived and directed ideas about what Nora wanted out of life. I didn’t love her any the less, maybe more, but I resigned myself to the obvious truth that I was no more at most than a kind of privileged expedient.

After high school, Nora and Corey and I drifted at different times across the hundred miles to the city. At first we saw each other now and then, but later hardly at all. Corey became a cop. Thanks to luck and cards and certain contacts, I learned to live well without excessive effort. As for Nora — well, I had just refused to do her a favor at Corey’s request, but there had been plenty of others to do her favors, as there always are with girls like her, and some of the favors came to five figures. Jack Kirby had not been the first. Maybe he would be the last.

I stood up and walked over to the windows and looked down into the court, down at the green stuff growing. I wasn’t used to the radiance of day, and the light seemed intensely bright, and it hurt my eyes. My head ached, and I wondered if I could stand another double shot, or even a single, but I decided that I couldn’t. Turning away from the windows, I walked back across the living room and into the soft and seductive dusk of the bedroom. I lay down on the unmade bed and tried to think with some kind of orderliness, and the thinking must have been therapeutic, for after a while I lost the headache, or became unaware of it.

Granted, I thought, that Nora knew the identity of Jack Kirby’s visitor, who was also Jack Kirby’s killer. Corey was convinced that she did, and Corey was a bright guy. Being a bright guy, it was funny how he could go so far wrong from a good start. It was funny, a real scream, but I didn’t feel like laughing. Because she’d refused to talk, because she’d run and hid to escape the pressure that would certainly have broken her down, Corey assumed that she was afraid of the consequences of pointing a finger, the vengeance of a killer or a killer’s hired hand, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. She had run from the pressure, true, but she had kept her silence simply because she did not want Jack Kirby’s visitor to be known. For old times’ sake. It was touching, really, and I appreciated it.

I went over in my mind again with odd detachment, as if I were reviewing an experience of someone else, the way it had happened that I had killed Jack Kirby. I hadn’t intended to, although it was a pleasure when I did, and all I’d actually intended when I went up to his apartment that night was to pay an overdue debt of a couple of grand.

I had lost the two grand to Kirby in a stud game that proved to be the beginning of a streak of bad luck. In the first place, to show how bad my luck was beginning to be, I lost the pot on three of a kind, which is pretty difficult to do in straight stud. In the second place, to show how fast bad luck can get worse in a streak, I didn’t have the two grand. All I had to offer was an IOU with a twenty-four-hour deadline. The deadline passed, and I still didn’t have the two grand. My intentions were good, but my luck kept on being bad. I got three extensions on the deadline, and then I had a couple of visitors. They came to my apartment about the middle of the afternoon, a few minutes after I’d gotten out of bed. I’d seen both of them around, and I knew the name of one of them, but the names didn’t matter. It was a business call, not social. They were very polite in a businesslike way. Only one of them talked.

“Mr. Sanders,” he said, “we’re representing Mr. Jack Kirby in a little business matter.”

“Times have been tough,” I said.

“Mr. Kirby appreciates that, but he feels that he’s been more than liberal.”

“Thank Mr. Kirby for me.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Kirby wants more than thanks. He wants to know if you’re prepared to settle your obligation.”

“How about a payment on account? Ten percent, say.”

“Sorry. Mr. Kirby feels that the obligation should be settled in full. He’s prepared to extend your time until eight o’clock tomorrow night. He expects you to call at his apartment at that hour with the full amount due and payable.”

“Tell Mr. Kirby I’ll give the matter my careful attention.”

“Mr. Kirby wants us particularly to remind you of the urgency.”

“Fine. Consider me reminded.”

“Mr. Kirby wants us to remind you in a manner that you will remember.” This was the clue to go to work, apparently, for that’s what they did. I wasn’t very alert yet, it being several hours until dark, and I put up what might be called a sorry defense. In fact, I didn’t put up any defense at all. The mute suddenly had me from behind in a combination hammerlock and stranglehold, and the talker, looking apologetic, belted me three times in the belly. At the door, leaving me doubled up on the floor, the talker stopped and looked back, an expression of compassion spreading among the pocks on his flat face.

“Sorry, Mr. Sanders,” he said. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

I wasn’t able to acknowledge the apology with the good grace it deserved. After they were gone, I began to breathe again, and a little later I successfully stood up. The beating had been painful, but not crippling.

It was a break in a way, the beating was. It was the nadir of the streak, the worst of the bad luck, and now that things had got about as bad as they could get, they began immediately to get better. What I mean is, I took the ten percent I’d offered Kirby’s hired goons and ran it through another game of stud and brought it out multiplied by twenty. A little better than four grand in paper with not an IOU in the bundle. By midnight I had in my possession, as the talking goon had said, the full amount due and payable.

The next night at eight, I was at Kirby’s door. I rang the bell, and Kirby let me in. He was wearing most of a tux, the exception being a maroon smoking jacket with a black satin sash. I happen to have an aversion to satin sashes, on smoking jackets or anything else, and this put me in a bad humor. It made it more difficult than ever to be reasonable about the beating he had bought for me. Apparently I was wearing nothing to which he had a comparable aversion. His long, sallow face, divided under a long nose by a long, thin moustache, was perfectly amiable.

“Hello, Mark,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

“Even broke?” I said.

“Sorry.” His face lost its amiability. “Poverty depresses me.”

“Never mind. I’m not one of your huddled masses. I come loaded.”

“Good.” The amiability was back. “I was sure you could manage if you really tried.”

I took the ready bundle from a pocket, two grand exactly, and handed it to him. He transferred it to a pocket of his offending jacket with hardly more than a glance, and this put me in a worse humor than I was already in, which was bad enough. I knew he would count the money the moment I was gone, and it would have been less annoying if he had counted it honestly in front of me.

“Now I’ll have the IOU, if you don’t mind,” I said.

“Certainly, Mark.” He took the paper out of the same pocket the money had gone into. “I hope you don’t resent the little reminder I was forced to send you.”

“Not at all. It was very courteous and regretful, and it only hit me where it doesn’t show.”

“I’m glad you understand. Will you have a drink before you leave?”

“Bourbon and water.”

“Good. I’ll have one with you.”

He turned and walked over to a liquor cabinet and worked for a minute with a bottle and glasses. “I’m sorry I can’t ask you to stay for more than one, but I’m expecting company.”

“Company’s nice if it’s nice company.”

“This is nice. Someone you once knew, I believe. Nora Erskine? Charming girl. Beautiful. She has a very warm nature. Very generous.”

He came toward me with a glass in each hand, and I hit him in the mouth. Don’t ask me why. Maybe a disciple of Freud could tell you, but I can’t. He fell backward in a shower of bourbon and came up with a little gun in his hand, which seemed to indicate that he hadn’t been quite so amiable and trusting as he’d appeared. The cut-glass decanter was there on a table beside me, and I picked it up and smashed it over his head, and he fell down dying and was dead in less than a minute.

Stripped to the bone, that was how I killed him. I tried to remember if I had touched anything besides the decanter and the outside of the door, and there seemed to be nothing, and so I wiped the neck of the decanter with my handkerchief and retrieved the two grand, which was no good to him, and left. I went home and thought about it, wondering if I should leave town incognito, but I decided that there was no need. The goons knew that I was supposed to be at Kirby’s, of course, but the goons were old pros. They’d done a job and were through with it. They couldn’t care less that Jack Kirby had got himself killed. As a matter of fact, if they made the logical deduction, I would probably go up immeasurably in their regard. The result of my thinking was the decision that it was unnecessary to take any precipitate action. I only needed to proceed with caution, as the signs beside the highways say, in the direction I was going.

But that was then, and now was different. Now I knew that Nora knew, and Nora was not an old pro, and Nora would surely someday tell. Maybe not now or soon, but someday, the day she couldn’t stand the pressure any longer, and the passage of time would not help or save me, for there is no statute of limitations on murder, not even murder which might turn out to be, with luck and a good lawyer, of lesser degree than first. And there was always the solid possibility, of course, of that grim first.

I could see that I had come to the time of decision now, and I didn’t want to face it. Like many another in the same predicament, I found a way to avoid it temporarily, if not permanently. In any case it was simple. I simply went to sleep.

When I awoke again, it was evening, but the hour of the day was the only thing that had changed, not me or the problem or anything that had to be considered and done or not done. I got up and washed my face in cold water and put on a tie and jacket and went downstairs onto the street. There was a newsstand on the corner, half a block away, and I went down there and bought an evening edition and carried it back to the apartment without looking at it. In the apartment, I poured another double shot and drank half of it and sat down and opened the newspaper, and there was the story on page one: Material Witness in Kirby Slaying Flees State. I read the story slowly, finishing the second shot of the double as I read, and it was reported about the way Corey had told it to me in the morning, how Nora was believed to know the identity of Kirby’s visitor at the time of the murder, and how she had refused to talk, and how, finally, she had escaped into the next state, from which she could not be extradited. It was also reported in the story exactly where she had gone and now was, the home of her childhood not more than a hundred miles away, and this was what I needed in order to make the decision I had to make, and you can see why. Now that her location was no longer a secret shared by me and the police, Nora was in greater danger and, as a consequence, so was I. There was therefore no longer any reason for indecision or delay, although there was probably no reason to hurry either.

I sat there for quite a long while, and it began to get dark outside in the city streets, and the incandescents and fluorescents and neons came on to drive the darkness back. I finally became aware, via my stomach, that I hadn’t eaten all day, and that I had better eat something before I took another drink, which I wanted, and so I went out and had a steak in a restaurant down the street a few blocks. After eating, I walked back and had a couple more drinks in the apartment, and then I went down and got my car out of the garage in the basement and drove across town to a place where they were having a stud game. I won five hundred skins in the game, the good streak still running in the wake of the bad streak, and at some point in the time it took to win that much money, my mind made itself up and I knew what I was going to do. I dropped out of the game about three o’clock in the morning, a little after, and it was almost four when I got home.

In the bedroom of the apartment, I changed into slacks, sport shirt and jacket, heavier shoes. From a shelf in the closet I got a leather case that contained a .30 — .30 rifle. I had been very good with a rifle when I was younger. There was no reason to believe that I wasn’t still almost as good. I assembled the rifle and checked it and took it apart again. I put the parts back into the case and half a dozen cartridges into my jacket pocket. I don’t know why I took so many, for chances were long that a dozen would not be enough if one wasn’t. Carrying the case, I went back downstairs to my car and drove out of town.

It took me about three hours driving slowly, to reach the town where I had grown up a hundred years or so ago, and I did not drive into it after reaching it. Instead, I drove around it on roads I remembered, and beyond it on another road until I saw ahead of me, quite a distance and on the left, the white house of the Erskines. It sat rather far back from the road at the end of a tree-lined drive, though not so far as memory had it, and it had once been considered the finest farm home in the county, if not the state. Now it did not seem one-half so grand, a different house than I had known before, as if the first had been razed and a second built in its place in an identical design, with identical detail, but on a reduced scale.

I turned off before I reached the house, along the side of a country square. The road descended slowly for a quarter of a mile to a steel and timber bridge across a shallow ravine. There had been water in the ravine in the spring, and there would be water again when the fall rains came, but now the bed was dry except for intermittent shallow pools caught in rock. After crossing the bridge, I pulled off the road on a narrow turning into high weeds and brush. Getting out of the car, carrying the rifle case, I climbed a barbed-wire fence and followed the course of the ravine through a stand of timber, mostly oaks and maples and elms, and across a wide expanse of pasture in which a herd of Holsteins were having breakfast. Pretty soon I left the ravine and cut across two fields at an angle and up a long rise into a grove of walnut trees on the crest. I stopped among the trees and assembled and loaded the rifle, and then I lay down and looked down the slope on the other side of the crest to the house where Nora was supposed to be. There was a stone terrace on this side of the house at the rear. On the terrace was a round table and several brightly striped canvas chairs. Wide glass doors led off the terrace into the house. No one was visible from where I lay under the walnut trees about fifty yards away.

After half an hour, I rolled over onto my back and lay looking up into the branches of the trees where the green walnuts hung, and I began to remember all the times I’d come here to gather the nuts when I was a kid, sometimes with Nora in the later years. We gathered them in burlap bags — gunny sacks, they were called — and later knocked the blackened husks off with a hammer. For a long time afterward, if we didn’t wear gloves, our hands were stained with the juice of the husks, a stain like the stain of nicotine, and there was no way to get this stain off except to wear it off, and you could always tell the ones who had gathered walnuts late in the fall by the stain on their hands that wore on toward winter.

I could hear a cow bell jangling back in the pasture. I could hear a dog barking. I could hear the cawing of a crow above the fields, and I thought I could hear, closing my eyes, the slow beating of his black wings against the still air. Opening my eyes, I rolled over and looked down the slope again to the terrace, and there was Nora standing beside the table and looking up toward the walnut grove as if she could see me lying in its shadow. She was wearing a white blouse and brown shorts, and her face and arms and legs were golden in the morning light. Drawing the rifle up along my side into firing position, I had her heart in my sights in a second, and I had a notion that it was a golden heart pumping golden blood.

She must have stood there for a full minute without moving, maybe longer, and then she turned and walked across the terrace and through the glass doors into the house, and I lowered my face slowly into the sweet green grass. I could still hear the bell and the dog and the crow, and I could hear the voice of Corey McDown saying that Mark Sanders was just a guy with kinks.

After a while I stood up and went back across the fields to the ravine and along the ravine through the pasture and the woods to the car. Driving to the city, I thought about what I had better do, and where I had better go, and how long it would take to learn to live comfortably with a constant threat, and I decided, although there was probably no hurry, that I might as well get my affairs in order and get somewhere a long way off as soon as possible.