They went on a few steps farther, and someone coughed behind them. Greeley turned to look and there was a uniformed cop standing there in the entrance they’d just passed, and the cop suddenly keeled over and flattened out and lay there face down across the doorstep.
Lifting a gun, Greeley wheeled, jumped back, Brown a step behind him. Joe crouched down over the man and tilted his head, and a thread of blood came down beside the bluecoat’s ear.
“Bernstorff,” he whispered. “The one we’ve been so long—”
The gun was grabbed from Joe Greeley’s hand and someone was pounding up the rickety stairs with no attempt at caution or concealment, and Joe stood up. He was alone in the doorway.
“Bill!” he bellowed. “Hold it! That’s your gun, and there’s only one bullet in it!” But somehow he knew that Brown had thought of that before he sprinted in there.
Joe plunged in after him, but they came before he’d even reached the foot of the stairs. Six slashing, vindictive shots, so fast you couldn’t count between them. And then a pause, and then a single shot as if in contemptuous answer, somehow sounding steady, sure, unhurried. Fired by the kind of wrist that could take aim above a dock of school kids and never falter.
Detective William Brown was lying there at the head of the stairs, up on the fourth floor, when Greeley got to him. There was a motionless huddled figure at the other end of the dim hall.
Brown’s eyes were still open and they saw Greeley when Joe’s face came close in stooping to pass an arm under Brown so the fallen detective’s last few breaths could come easier.
“How am I doing?” he panted. “Does that square it?”
Brown lowered his head just once, kept it down.
“You won’t tell them?”
“I don’t know anything to tell — except you got Bernstorff. Good luck, Bill Brown.”
The last thing Brown said, his eyes already lidding closed, was, “I wasn’t so smart after all.”
Yes, he was smart all right, Joe Greeley thought, turning away, and he meant it in sincerest admiration. Smarter than I’ll ever be. That was the whole trouble. Just a little bit dumber, a little bit slower, and he would have been all right. Just a little less speed, just a little more control...
Afterword to “Detective William Brown”
The title character of “Detective William Brown” (Detective Fiction Weekly, September 10, 1938) strikes me as the ultimate Noir Cop in the Woolrich canon, a conscienceless opportunist who rises through the ranks of the force thanks to a combination of brutality and raw courage. The story’s viewpoint character however is not Brown but his plodding, dedicated and relatively humane boyhood friend Greeley, and the plot takes us through yet another of Woolrich’s oscillations as Greeley slowly, by fits and starts but inexorably comes to learn the truth behind Brown’s meteoric rise to the top — the truth which, as in “Endicott’s Girl,” is covered up at the climax. Such, Woolrich tells us, are the men who are licensed to kill us at their whim, and even those who enter the life as decent people are corrupted by the system they serve.
The Case of the Killer-Diller
Chapter One
Death of a Sandman
In the streets outside it was broad daylight already, but down in the basement-room night shadows still lingered on. Through stratified layers of hours-old cigarette smoke, unable to find its way out of the poorly ventilated place, two motionless forms, both in grotesque postures, were indistinctly visible. One was a girl huddled asleep on a piano bench, her head and arms resting on the keyboard. The other was a man, toes pointed downward, head on chest, finger-tips touching his sides, as though he were staring entranced at something on the floor.
The basement itself was no different from any other sub-street-level space of its kind. Bare whitewashed walls, an oblong vent fitted with opaque wire-meshed glass high up on one side, that looked out at about the level of passersby’s insteps, an array of steam and water pipes of varying girths that ran out parallel to the ceiling for half its length, then disappeared through it by means of elbow-joints. It was what the cellar contained that set it apart.
There were numbers of ordinary, unpainted wooden kitchen chairs scattered about, most of them overturned. For nearly every chair there was a complementary gin bottle lying discarded somewhere nearby — empty or with only a finger’s width left in it at the most — and a musical instrument: trap-drum, clarinet, sax, and so on. There was a table too, scalloped around the edges with cigarette burns, some of them with ash cylinders still in them. Loose orchestration sheets and more empty bottles littered its surface, bringing the bottle ratio up to nearly two per chair.
A venturesome cockroach traveled across an orchestration-leaf of Ravel’s Bolero that had fallen to the floor. It didn’t look so different from the other notes, except that it was bigger and kept moving slowly along the clef-bars instead of staying in one place. There was a peculiar acrid pungency in the air that didn’t come from liquor, and that no ordinary cigarette ever made either.
As the daylight filtered in more and more strongly through the clouded sidewalk-level pane, the girl who slept with her arms on top of the yellowed piano-keys, stirred a little, raised her head. Nearly two whole octaves of pressed-down keys, freed of her weight, reared into place with a series of little clashing discords. The sound woke her more fully.
“In the groove,” she murmured dreamily, and blinked her eyes open.
Her silky butterscotch-colored hair, worn smooth and long, came tumbling down over her face, and she brushed it back with one hand. Then her eyes went upward, took in the other figure, who seemed to be dancing there before her in the hazy air, to unheard notes. She shot up from the piano-bench.
“Hal!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing up—” She choked it off short. He was being dead up there, hanging by his neck from a thick electric cord that looped down between two of the exposed steam pipes.
She stumbled back against the keyboard and her hand struck it, brought forth another discordant jangle. She sidestepped, terrified even by that harmless sound. The exploring cockroach scampered off the orchestration-sheet, scurried back toward its cranny.
“They’ve all gone, left me here alone with — it,” she sobbed.
She stared distractedly at the overturned chairs, turned and fought her way through the stagnant air toward the closed wooden door at the back of the place.
She threw it open and looked up and down the dim basement passage lit by a single wan bulb. Rows of empty ashcans were pyramided at one end of it. She was on the verge of hysteria by now. It was not alone what she had just seen, it was also partly due to the depression that always set in after the over-stimulation of one of those jam-sessions — a sort of musical hang-over, so to speak. How the men in the outfit must be feeling, she could only imagine. She didn’t drink gin or blaze reefers the way they did.
“Fred! Frankie! Dusty!” she whispered hoarsely, standing there in the open doorway. The long brick-walled passage echoed to it hollowly, like a tomb. She shuddered, crouched back against the wall. A black cat slunk out between two of the ashcans and she gave a tinny little bleat, half superstitious reflex, half actual alarm.