So then I took out the glass eye and showed it to him, and told him how I traced it back. I saw them give each other looks and shake their heads sort of surprised over it, and one of them said, “Not bad! Not bad at all!”
“Not bad?” snapped my father.
“How’d you know where I was?”
“In the first place,” he said, “your mother caught right on that Scanny was lying when he said you were studying over at his house, because in your excitement you kids overlooked the fact that tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and there’s no school to study for. She sent me over there, I broke Scanny down, and he showed me where this room was you’d followed this man to earlier in the day.
“I broke in, looked it over, and found a couple of those newspaper items about this old man Gregory that he’d taken the trouble to mark off and clip out. I didn’t like the looks of that to begin with, and your friend Scanny had already mentioned something about a glass eye. Luckily they gave the recluse’s address — which was what had put Petersen onto him, too — and when eleven-thirty came and no sign of you, I rustled up a car and chased out there fast.”
We stopped off at Headquarters first, so he could make out his report, and he had me meet some guy with white hair who was his boss, I guess. He clapped my shoulder right where it hurt most from all those falls I’d had, but I didn’t let him see that. I saw my father wasn’t going to say anything himself, so I piped up: “The whole case is my father’s and nobody else’s! Now is he going to get re-instituted?”
I saw them wink at each other, and then the man with white hair laughed and said, “I think I can promise that.” Then he looked at me and added, “You think a lot of your father, don’t you?”
I stood up straight as anything and stuck my chin out and said, “He’s the best damn dick in town!”
Afterword to “Through a Dead Man’s Eye”
In “Through a Dead Man’s Eye” (Black Mask, December 1939) Woolrich reworked some of the elements from “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (1937), his first thriller with a boy as narrator and protagonist, and produced a tale just as vivid and suspenseful but more naturalistic and circumstantial, without the earlier story’s fairy-tale overtones. The climax with 12-year-old Frankie being stalked by the man who takes long walks deep into the forest is an orgy of breathless terror that no one but Woolrich could have written so effectively.
The Fatal Footlights
I
He saw Vilma first. She was the dark one. Then he saw Gilda. She was the golden one. He didn’t see the man at all, that first night. He didn’t know any of their names. He didn’t want to. He’d just gone to a show on his night off.
He had an aisle seat, alongside the runway. He’d told the ticket seller he wanted to see more than just their baby-blue eyes. The ticket seller had said, “You will.” He’d been right, it turned out.
It was, of course, simply burlesque under a different name, to evade the licensing restrictions of the last few years. But at the moment Benson took his seat, there wasn’t anything going on that a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl couldn’t have watched with perfect propriety. A black-haired singer in a flowing, full-length dress was rendering Mighty Lak a Rose. And she was good, too.
But this was his night off and he felt kind of cheated. “Did I walk in on a funeral?” he asked himself. He shouldn’t have asked that, maybe. The mocking little gods of circumstances were only too willing to arrange it for him.
The singer walked off, the orchestra gave out with an introductory flourish, and the proceedings snapped back into character. The curtains parted to reveal a “living statue” group — five or six nymphs enameled a chalky white, their torsos veiled by wisps of cheesecloth, presided over by a central “statue” poised on a pedestal in their midst. This was Gilda, the main attraction.
Gilda stood there, head thrown back, seemingly in the act of nibbling at a dangling cluster of grapes. Whether she was as innocent of vesture as she seemed was beside the point; her body was coated with a thick layer of scintillant golden paint which was certainly far more protective than any ordinary clothes would have been. But that didn’t dampen the general enthusiasm any. It was just the principle of the thing that mattered. Good clean fun, so to speak. She got a tremendous hand without doing a thing — just for art’s sake.
The curtains coyly came together again, veiling the tableau. There was a teasing pause, maintained just long enough to whet the audience’s appetite for more, then they parted once more and the “statuary” had assumed a different position. Gilda was now shading her eyes with one hand, one leg poised behind her, and staring yearningly toward the horizon — or more strictly speaking, a fire door at the side of the auditorium.
Benson caught the spirit of the thing along with everyone else and whacked his hands. The curtains met, parted once more, and again the tableau had altered. This time Gilda was up on tiptoes on her pedestal, her body arched over as though she was looking at her own reflection in a pool.
Just before the curtains obliterated her, Benson thought he saw her waver a little, as if having difficulty maintaining her balance. Or maybe it was simply faulty timing. She had prepared to change positions a little too soon, before the curtains entirely concealed her from view. That slight flaw didn’t discourage the applause any. It had reached the pitch of a bombardment. The audience wasn’t a critical one; it didn’t care about complete muscular control as long as it got complete undress. Or the illusion of it, through gold-plating.
The pause was a little longer this time, as though there had been a slight hitch. Benson wondered where the dancing came in. They had billed her out front as “The Golden Dancer,” he remembered, and he wanted his money’s worth. He didn’t have long to wait. The footlights along the runway, unused until now, gushed up, the curtains parted, and Gilda was down on the stage floor now, and in motion.
She was coming out on the runway to dance over their heads. For this additional intimacy, she had provided herself with a protective mantle of gauzy black — just in case some of the Commissioner’s men happened to be in the audience.
She wasn’t any great shakes as a dancer; nobody expected her to be, nobody cared. It was mostly a matter of waving her arms, turning this way and that, and flourishing the mantle around her, a little bit like a bullfighter does his cape. She managed, while continually promising revealing gaps in it, to keep it all around her at all times, in a sort of black haze, like smoke. It was simply the striptease in a newer variation.
But indifferent as her dancing ability was to begin with, a noticeable hesitation began to creep into its posturing after she had been on the runway a few moments. She seemed to keep forgetting what to do next.
“They hardly have time to rehearse at all,” Benson thought leniently.
Her motions had slowed down like a clock that needs winding. He saw her cast a look over her shoulders at the unoccupied main stage, as if in search of help. The lesser nymphs hadn’t come out with her this last time, were probably doing a quick change for the next number.
For a moment she stood there perfectly still, no longer moving a muscle. The swirling black gauze deflated about her, fell limp. Benson’s grin of approval dimmed and died while he craned his neck up at her. Suddenly she started to go off balance.