The Long Night (2 page)

“Don't you want to know why I—I need your help?”

“It'll keep. I'm not asking questions. If you want to tell me, I'll listen. If not, I'm a democrat and you're free, white and twenty-eight. What do you say we leave it at that for now?”

Almost meekly, she said, “All right. My head aches too much to let me argue. I guess it's from having too much on my mind. . . . You can't understand . . . there's a limit to what a girl can take. . . .”

“Can't your doctor do anything for you?”

“This isn't anything a doctor can cure.”

“You can't say that until you've let him run the tape over you.”

“If you knew the way I'm being persecuted, you wouldn't talk like that. I was hoping when I wrote——” She stopped abruptly. And she didn't say any more.

When I'd waited long enough, I said, “I'm no good at this sort of thing before breakfast. Maybe you'd better keep the rest until later . . . if that's all right with you?”

In a tone that was little more than a husky whisper, she said, “I've been drinking such a lot . . . all night . . . since I realised what he might do. And there isn't much time before he . . .” Her voice receded until it was nothing but a faint thread of sound through her tears. She seemed to have gone very far away.

I said, “Don't worry about it now. Just relax. Soon's
I've got some clothes on, I'll pick up a cab and be right with you.”

From a long way off, she said, “Yes . . . please. . . . But hurry . . . hurry. . . .”

She didn't say any more after that. And she didn't hang up. The phone rattled like she'd dropped the receiver and I heard small noises in the distant background. Then I heard nothing at all.

A rain squall buffeted the window again as I got out of bed and put on the ceiling light. With the draught from under the door soaking into my bones, I began to dress.

There was no moon in Gifford Street and there was no sky, either. There was only the rain and the blustering wind and the threshing of tyres on the glistening pavement.

The jockey said, “That'll be a dollar twenty, mister . . . lousy night, ain't it?” He was a thick-lipped guy with lizard eyes and big red ears that looked like they'd suffered from chilblains.

I paid him off and I got out. If I could've thought of anything to say that would've been an improvement on his description of the weather, I'd have said it. But I couldn't. So all I said was, “'Night . . .” as he slammed the cab door and I sprinted across the sidewalk.

Not that it would've made any difference what I said. The way things turned out, I could've discussed isobars and barometric pressure variations with him without altering the future course of events two hoots. The only mistake I made was in not getting him to wait for me. That was the kind of mistake a guy makes when he opens the wrong door and falls down the elevator shaft.

The entrance to number 621 was a recessed doorway three stone steps up from the sidewalk. Inside the doorway there was a black rubber mat inlaid with white numerals. No one
had walked on the mat since it had begun to rain heavily like it was raining now.

On the right-hand wall a frosted globe shone down on a string of names and apartment numbers. Miss Judith Walker was on the fifth floor.

In the lobby all the lights except one were out. That one was a dim bulb over the foot of the stairs. Somewhere beyond the bend in the stairs another nightlight burned.

Two oval eyes of light glowed in the blank face of the elevator doors and made twin splashes of gold on the floor of the lobby. In every corner the shadows took the shape of people and things that weren't there. Three a.m. is no time for an imaginative guy to be calling on a would-be suicide.

Everything was nice and quiet—the way you'd expect it to be at three o'clock in the morning. Far off in the distance the motor of a car was a pulsing murmur that merged into the beating of the blood in my ears. The hiss of the rain lay all around like an overtone to the silence. The noise of my shoes on the tiled floor was too loud.

At the foot of the stairs, I hesitated. I wondered if it might not be more discreet to walk up when visiting a dame in the small hours of the yawning. If I were seen going into her apartment, folks who didn't know me might think things. Those who did know me wouldn't need to think—they'd know for sure.

But five lots of stairs is a lot of stairs. I went into the elevator and closed the doors very, very gently. Then I pushed the button that said:
Fifth Floor.

Somewhere far above, a sweet motor whined faintly and my stomach settled lower. I went up with little more sound than if I'd been riding a magic carpet. All I could hear was the noise of the rain on the motor-house roof 'way up on the eighteenth floor.

It wasn't a long ride but it gave me that much extra time to think: to think about Judith Walker and what she was maybe thinking. She might not have allowed for the trouble I'd had finding a cab. And she'd told me to hurry. It was going to be just too bad if she'd come to the conclusion I was standing her up.

Any damn' fool knows what I should've done after she'd
gone off the phone. I should've stopped where I was in my snug little bed and called John Law. They are the guys who get paid for restraining broads with the bugs from taking a run-out powder.

But all her talk could've been just talk. She'd said she'd been hitting the bottle. I've known sober dames say the screwiest things. Any time one of them meets herself on the way back from a long shikker, I'd be prepared for her to threaten most anything.

So I might've whistled up a pair of flatfeet . . . and chances were they'd have roused number 621 Gifford Street just to find Miss Judith Walker sleeping off a drunk . . . and she'd have said I was crazy with the heat . . . if she even remembered speaking with me.

Which would've left me looking and feeling like a prize shmoe. And we're all entitled to a bit of vanity. Especially when I wasn't exactly popular in one or two places and there were a few characters who'd have liked to see me fall flat on my face so they could give me the big laugh.

On the other hand, I might've said, “Phooey!” and crawled back under the bedclothes and given the whole business a miss. Yeh . . . I might've done. But I've got to to go on living with myself. Sometimes it's hard enough as is it. And, stranger or no stranger, if Judith had been on the level I wouldn't have been able to sleep nights from then on.

Inside my head, I kept asking myself “. . .
Why me
?” And a little voice began to join in and tell me I was a sucker for a dame . . . any dame . . . day or night . . . drunk or sober. . . . I suddenly realised that I could've used a drink at that. As the elevator slid to a smooth stop, I was hoping Judith wouldn't have forgotten the traveller in the night.

The carpet on the hallway was soft and close-woven. I left the elevator doors open, took a peek both ways to see how the numbers ran, and went left. Miss Judith Walker's apartment was the fourth door. Like all the others, nothing stirred behind it.

Below her name-plate there was a tiny ivorine button with a raised metal surround in gilt. I touched it lightly, once. Inside the apartment, a bell chimed two musical notes. The echoing sound hung in the air for a long time. It
hadn't died away completely when I pushed the button again.

Maybe I waited a minute after that before I came to the conclusion that playing musical boxes wasn't going to get me anywhere. Miss Walker wasn't receiving callers. Or she slept very soundly. . . . That was a train of thought I didn't want to pursue.

Or she had gone out. Asking myself why she should've gone out and where wasn't likely to produce results, either. A dame who can call a strange guy at two in the morning and discuss suicide can do anything.

But she'd told me to hurry. And I could still hear her saying “. . .
There's a limit
. . .” in a plaintive voice that had stayed in my mind ever since.

About then, I discovered something that was quite a help. Whether she was at home or abroad, she'd left me an invitation to go on in. The door wasn't locked.

I took my hand off the knob and pushed gently with one finger. Somewhere farther along the hallway a guy made sleepy noises and bedsprings creaked. I could hear a clock ticking where no clock had ticked before . . . a far-off truck ground its way into the distance in low gear . . . under my feet, a floorboard complained . . . the door swung wide.

It was a comfortably furnished living-room with tasteful decorations and one or two pieces that indicated a certain amount of plush. Miss Judith Walker looked to be well-fixed.

The light was on. Directly facing me was another door. That was open, too. And the light was on in there as well. I had a good view of a reclining bedside chair on one side of a bed and a small hexagonal table on the other. A pair of stockings and a sheer slip had been thrown carelessly on the chair. A brassiere hung over the edge of the seat. Beneath it, a girdle had fallen on to the floor. Not far away, another couple of scraps of underwear lay on the carpet.

A nearly-full bottle of rye stood on the table next to an empty glass and an open handbag and an ashtray. Two cigarettes smouldered in the ashtray. I guess I must've been pretty tired. I don't remember wondering how there came to be two. But I found out soon enough.

In any case I wasn't very interested right then in
cigarettes or ashtrays or even bottles of rye. I was busy making a long-range inspection of the canary who was spread out negligently on top of the bed. Taking a detailed inventory of the furnishings just had to wait: first things come first.

I went in and closed the door. Then I soft-footed into the bedroom. And the nearer I got to her the stronger became the smell of liquor. The atmosphere was thick enough to be stored in a bonded warehouse.

She was lying on her back with her eyes shut and her lips slightly parted. Against the white of the pillow, her dark hair was a shining jet. She had long, curving eyelashes, a fine smooth skin, and faint hollows in the cheeks. Her face was pale and relaxed. Her only make-up was a very artistic mouth.

From north to south she was wearing a nylon nightdress that did more for my temperature than it could've done for hers. It wasn't quite transparent—not quite—but it didn't take an X-ray camera to see through it. And it must've been a Scotsman who had designed the bib-front held in place by a strap of narrow satin ribbon and a lot of will-power. Up till then I'd never believed dames really wore that kind of attire when they went to bed—even on honeymoon. I'd always thought only models wore them when posing for the kind of ads the boys in the army cut out and stick on the wall.

But she was wearing one all right. And I mean all right. What was more, she had long, slim legs and tapered hips and a most attractive chest development. In or out of bed, she was my idea of a honey. The colour of her eyes didn't make me no difference. But I was sorry about the rye she had spilled on the silk bedspread when she'd dropped her glass beside her. To me, it kind of spoiled things. And the way she stank of the stuff, it couldn't have been the first glass she'd spilled.

I stooped over her and watched the rise and fall of her breast and listened to her quiet breathing. When I raised one of her eyelids, she didn't stir. I touched the turned-up pupil but she still didn't stir.

Her pulse was slow and weak and her skin was cold. It felt clammy like she'd been perspiring a lot. All of which
indicated that she'd either had too much alcohol or too many phenobarbs. Or both. And that wasn't exactly healthy.

I put the glass on the bedside table and spent a few seconds studying the two cigarettes burning themselves out in the ashtray. Two cigarettes . . . and two glasses . . . and one overdone dame in an under-dressed condition. Two and two don't make one. . . .

All along I'd taken it for granted that she'd been alone when she'd called me. Now I began to get different ideas—crazy ideas. There'd been a guy with her . . . it had to be a guy . . . she wouldn't have dolled herself up like that to entertain her maiden aunt from Kalamazoo. And they'd had a cosy drink . . . or two . . . and she'd passed out . . . and he'd left her alone displaying her wares in the shop window . . . which rated him a permanent home in the city nut-house.

Yet. . . he had left her. And not so long before I'd arrived. The ash on the cigarettes wasn't much more than an inch long . . . and the hall door had been unlocked, so he'd taken it on the lam just in time to avoid meeting me . . . which meant he'd been around when she'd said her little piece on the phone and . . . why?

That was it. Why? A lot of why's. Such as why both cigarettes were daubed with lipstick and why both had the same length of ash and why ash and stub totalled the length of a cigarette as near as dammit. They had been lit but not smoked . . . and they'd been lit by her. She'd laid herself down on top of the bed and slopped rye all over her nightdress and bedspread. It was sticky on her arms and her bare shoulders. There was some on the table as well.

To duck out like he had done, he must've been sober. And she slept like the dead because she'd been doped to the eye-balls with sleeping pills. And the phone call had been nothing but a gag. And she hadn't been drunk when she'd given me that load of hooey about headaches and the end of the road. But she'd talked drunk. That was another why.

Whichever way you look at it, I was Sammy the Sucker. Just a gag—no motive, no reason. But the gag had backfired. I had better than an idea Miss Judith Walker might not wake up again if somebody didn't get her to hospital. But quick.

Then I got another idea. It could be that I'd been picked as the fall guy. The hour, the dame, and the rye regardless
. . . it made a nice set-up . . . if I'd been married . . . and if I'd had a jealous wife . . . and if I were worth blackmailing.