They kicked the chair out from under him again and again, they tortured him by holding glasses of water before his swollen, bleeding lips, then slowly emptying them out on the floor as he strained forward to drink.
“Water!” he wept. “Water! Oh, if you ever had mothers, just a drop of water — and I’ll tell you everything you want.”
He’d broken. As unexpectedly as that.
Another glass was brought, poised within his sight, but withheld.
“Say it!”
“Yes, I shot Tomasso. I was on dope and I had to have money. I waited until he’d closed up the poolroom that night. I’d purposely left my hat behind in there. I went back pretending I’d forgotten it, and he let me in, and I—
“I’ll get the chair for it anyway, and they can’t fry you more than once. That Frankie Reynolds thing you were asking me about — yes, I done that too. And Allroyd, the bill collector, that was me too.”
There were only two of them left in there with him by this time — Greeley and another man. The captain had already hurried out with the confession that the culprit just finished dictating and signing.
There was an electric pause. The two dicks looked at each other across the prisoner’s bowed head. Then Greeley jumped for him, grabbed him by the shoulder, dragged him to his feet. “What’d you just say? Allroyd? How’d you get in the building?”
“I was in it the whole time, from noon on. I must have gone in while the doorman was on relief, having his lunch. I was in the doctor’s office. He was treating me for the junk habit. A patient came in that had to have immediate attention, an emergency case, and they told me I’d have to wait. I was getting a sun bath under that lamp of his, in a little cabinet off the waiting room. I was already wanted for something and I was afraid to go back on the street again, so I stayed where I was. They were both too busy inside there, him and the nurse, to keep an eye on me. I saw Allroyd stop by to collect for the lamp, I got a glimpse of his receipts, and that gave me the idea. I slipped my shirt on, eased out and followed him upstairs. Then as soon as I — done it — I came back down, peeled my shirt off, and lay down on the cot under the lamp again. They never even missed me.”
His eyes rolled around in his head. He sagged across Greeley’s arm, and fainted away on his feet. “Did you hear that? We better get the old man in here again in a hurry!”
But the other dick swept his arm contemptuously, “Don’t pay any attention to him. These snowbirds’ll confess to anything once you get ’em started. He’s having a pipe-dream. We’ve worn him down till he don’t know what he’s saying any more.” He took the inert prisoner over, started to shake him like a terrier and slap him backhand across the mouth and cheeks to wake him up. “Watch him retract that and the whole string of them, even the Tomasso thing, as soon as he’s rested up a little and gotten hold of a mouth. You’re new at it, Greeley. That’s why you’re ready to believe anything they say.”
Greeley went out without waiting to argue, and up the basement stairs, looking for the captain. “New at it? Maybe I am,” he said to himself. “But people don’t confess to things they haven’t done. Not things they’re not being grilled about at the time.”
Brown was in the locker room as Joe passed through it. He was shrugging into his coat, getting ready to go home; he’d presumably taken a shower after the ardors of the grilling. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
Greeley stopped, turned and came back to him. “This’ll tell me,” he thought. “This is one way of finding out.” He fixed his eyes on Brown dead-center, locked and held Brown’s with them.
“He just said he killed Allroyd,” he said quietly.
The cigarette fell out of Brown’s mouth, and he took his face down out of range to fumble for the cigarette and pick it up. Then he threw it away anyway. His face was all right again when it came up level with Greeley’s once more, but it had had that minute to itself, to straighten out free of observation.
He said with unshakable calmness, “Boy, that’s a hot one! He did, did he? He sure must be high.” But he wasn’t, and they both knew it. He’d been in custody for nearly twenty-four hours now, and no drug lasts that long. Their eyes held magnetically, unbreakably. Brown’s refused to waver, to give an inch. (“Swell facial control,” thought Greeley.) And then Brown said, “Who was down there with him at the time?” Carefully casual. Too carefully casual.
That did it. “Now I know,” thought Greeley, and his stomach caved in.
He turned on his heel, went on his way to look up the captain. Behind him, Brown seemed to have changed his mind about going home after all. He was standing there perfectly motionless, looking for something in his locker. Or at least looking into it, lost in thought.
Greeley got the captain down to the basement with him again, but this Halpern was in a state of collapse. They had to let him alone for awhile. They didn’t believe it anyway, Greeley could tell that. Not even the captain.
“Take him out. He’s in bad shape,” the captain said, and the prisoner was removed to a detention cell in the adjoining building and locked up for the night.
Greeley went home. But Bill Brown was still there when he left — killing time, for there was nothing to keep him there any more.
When Greeley reported back the next day he found them in a welter of excitement. The prisoner had taken his own life in his cell sometime during the night. When they’d come to get him out to take him before the line-up, they’d found him with his wrists and throat slashed. He’d gotten hold of a razor blade in some way. They found it in there by him. It was old and rusted. It was a Jewel, single-edged. His shoelaces, his belt, and everything else by which he could possibly have harmed himself had been taken away from him, and yet he’d gotten hold of a thing like that.
Bill Brown was the last one who had seen him alive. He’d escorted him to the cell, supervised his incarceration. The prisoner had begged for cigarettes after the bars were locked, and Brown had taken pity on him, gotten him a pack, and thrown them in through the bars in the presence of the turnkey. They were found there at his feet, with just one taken out and partly smoked.
The captain had the turnkey in and raked him mercilessly over the coals. “You were responsible for his safekeeping once we turned him over to you! Now he was thoroughly searched, and he didn’t have as much as a pin on him! It musta been lying in there on the floor of the cell and he found it! I’m gonna report you for your carelessness, fella.”
“I know my job! He didn’t get that off no cell floor! That cell was thoroughly swept out before you brung him over.”
“Don’t give me no buts! He was on stuff, and they’re tricky!” the captain roared. “He should have been watched more closely.”
Him, and I wonder who else? Greeley thought dismally.
Two weeks after, he came in a little later than usual one day, with an overnight growth of beard, as though he hadn’t had time to shave at home, and they all kidded him about it.
Bill Brown — a recommendation for his promotion had gone in and he was feeling good-natured these days — offered to lend him a kit he kept in his locker. Several of the others kept spares on hand like that too.
Mrs. Joe, at about that same time, was replacing the shaving things she’d laid out for him at home and which he hadn’t used. “I wonder why not?” she thought.
He was in the precinct house washroom just then, making use of Brown’s. It was a Jewel, made to hold single-edged blades.
VI
“Yeah,” Brown was saying one night, “promotion’s one thing, but it’s these long waits in between that give you ants in the pants. How long is it, now, since that Allroyd case?”