“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 other 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.”
Afterword to “The Case of the Killer-Diller”
The title is unappetizing but “The Case of the Killer-Diller” (Dime Detective. May 1939) is a first-rate pulper, reminiscent of Woolrich’s classic “Dime a Dance” (1938) in that its female protagonist, scratching out a living in a vividly rendered low-rent environment, becomes live bait in the trap set for a multiple murderer. With its vivid musical background and effective suspense and surprisingly casual treatment of drug use among jazz people, this is one of many Woolrich stories from the Thirties that deserves to have been resurrected long before the 21st century.